Introducing Tech Roundup Volume 1

It’s been a few days since I announced myself on Steemit, I did want to have this article posted early but my real life work needed attention. Being a Community Manager for a game is awesome, but the workload skyrockets unexpectedly all the time!

So without further ado, I’d like to welcome you to my first serious article on steemit, volume 1 of my Tech Roundup.

In this article series where I will be talking about PC Hardware. For my first article I am going to tackle an interesting phenomena that I've started to notice in the various tech communities, and that is the perception verses the reality.

A Bit of Background

If you are a hardware enthusiast or even if you simply know a bit about PC Hardware it is quite likely that you would know when it comes to selecting your CPU (processor) and your graphics card, you are not spoilt for choice. In-fact in both cases you only have a choice of two. With the CPU it's between Intel and AMD and for a dedicated graphics card you can only choose between an AMD or Nvidia.

- A note here, Intel do have their own graphics solution - the HD series, however these are integrated graphics processors that are on the same package as the main processor and you are not really able to game using them. They are however, trying to build their own high end Graphics Card, but these are not yet available and wont be for a really long time.

When you start to browse through reviews and stories of the processors and graphics cards; whether it's professional, anecdotal or independent you are extremely likely to come across several statements regarding them. That is that AMD Graphics cards have bad drivers, whereas Nvidia drivers are excellent and that Intel CPUs are the best for gaming and AMD CPUs tend to fall a bit flat.

But is that really the case? This article will try to explore these labels and see whether they are well deserved or if the community have been deceiving themselves.

Perception verses Reality: Graphics Cards

Before I begin, I just want to make clear that this is not an article to say which side (AMD or Nvidia) is better, but rather it is to explore the accuracy of the 'Nvidia Drivers are better' statement. As an enthusiast I will always use the hardware that provides the best performance for the price that I am willing to pay, choosing an inferior product simply due to fanboyism is utter ridiculous to me.

So let's get started. I mentioned that the overall sentiment from the tech community is that Nvidia cards have better driver support. To back this up, I did a quick search just to verify it and it's pretty much everywhere:

Deskdecode, 2015
"I prefer Nvidia is best when it comes to drivers or drivers update, they also have their own software named “Nvidia GeForce Experience” which will always keep you up to date with your video card drivers and lot more. On the other hand, AMD sucks with their drivers update and at some point it becomes problematic."

Techradar, 2017
"One key draw to Nvidia hardware over AMD is the Green Team’s GeForce Experience software.

Because it delivers driver updates and optimizes games in addition to letting you broadcast gameplay and capture screenshots as well as videos directly from its easy-to-use interface, Nvidia GeForce Experience is posited as the one PC gaming application to rule them all."

Overclock.net User Poll, 2016
Here you can see the users comments, the majority support the statement that Nvidia has better drivers.

PCGamesN, 2016
"AMD are still fighting against history and all those forum comments of 'AMD drivers suck.'"

Hopefully the few examples I've given are enough to give you an idea that it is a common theme to say that Nvidia have the better drivers. Countless Youtube comments on graphics card reviews are also dedicated to the same sentiment, Nvidia is just assumed to have better drivers.

But is true?

First Case: Windows Vista

It is my opinion that this is sentiment that the community hold is simply not true, I would even hazard a guess that a lot of people are simply repeating what they have heard without having first hand experience. There is also evidence to support my opinion which I will go through now.

Lets go back in time to when Windows Vista was released. Most of us know that that version of Windows was pretty bad, I remember pretty well that my first experience with Linux was at that time simply because Windows Vista drove me insane. It was so bad in-fact that a lawsuit was brought up against Microsoft.

In this lawsuit, the amount of crashes that Windows Vista experienced during 2007 was tallied up and very handily put together in a pdf. If you are interested in this pdf you can find it here.

This Pie Chart shows the top 5 causes of crashes for Windows Vista in 2007:

As you can see, Nvidia was actually the number one cause of a system crash with Windows Vista. AMD (back then ATI) was down in 4th place. Something that the tech community are quick to forget is that during this time it took Nvidia over a month to supply drivers for it's latest hardware (the fantastic GTX 8800) and even then the driver release was in beta. It took the entirety of 2007 for Nvidia to sort out the majority of their problems.

Now when you look at AMD (ATI back then) it was clear that they did not have the same crashing problems. However they did have other problems (which sort of sticks to this day) and that is that the drivers were somewhat less optimized for the latest game releases. That meant the in-game FPS performance would not be as high as the Nvidia cards. This does raise an interesting question, what is a better? A driver that will frequently crash your system but when it does work, it gives you better performance, or a driver that leaves your system more stable, but offers worse performance in games?

Second Case: Drivers Causing the Death of Hardware

Drivers killing hardware. To be fair this has happened to both AMD and Nvidia. A driver release corrupts something with the fan settings or heat monitor and so the cooling system is unable to respond to the heat that the GPU generates. Whilst I acknowledge that it has happened to both, I would argue that the case for Nvidia was much worse. Surprisingly, going by the tech communities reactions on the various platforms (youtube video comments especially) it seems that everyone has forgotten that this has happened. In early 2010 Nvidia released it's (now infamous) 196.75 driver but they failed to notice a major bug with it. Using the driver would cause the cooling system to malfunction and there were many cases of Graphics Cards overheating and totally dying due to that bug. Total hardware failure due to a software bug is a major issue, one that Nvidia did it’s best to cover up.
The 196.75 driver issue was widely reported in the tech press, one of the examples can be found over on zdnet

To be fair to Nvidia, once the issue was reported they did pull the driver and recommend anyone that had updated to downgrade, sensible steps by the GPU giant. That said, this piece is not to talk about how AMD and Nvidia respond to their problems, but to challenge the notion that only AMD suffer from problems related to software.

Third Case: Anecdotal from the past 3 years

Anecdotal evidence is always a touchy subject, it relies on the reader to trust the author and as a new one on steemit I do not expect people to simply 'take my word for it' which is why I left it for last. That said, there is enough evidence online to support my views and I'll add a link at the bottom to it.

In the last 5 years, I had the pleasure of working in a pretty big publishing company (in Germany) and was quite pleased to be using PCs that used Nvidia graphics cards from the extremely popular 750ti, to the budget king that was the 960 to the king of the high end that was the 980ti. However, the issue came with the ‘Nvidia Game-Ready drivers’. As a publisher, we had a mixture of older titles and newer ones, and at the same time were expected to play games from our direct competitors to keep us in the know of how games are being run. However, between 2015 to 2016 the Game-Ready drivers were the culprit of a high amount of crashes to the point where specific did do not load. This was so extreme that the hardware maintenance team sent out specific requests not to update Nvidia drivers on release day (no matter what version) so that they could be tested internally.

Now, as the writer, I do acknowledge that this is a purely anecdotal piece of evidence as to the ignorance of the tech community towards Nvidia’s driver issues and your experience may differ. However it was one of the first things that made me seriously question the notion of Nvidia’s driver superiority and so lead to many discussions with my co-workers. That said, there is evidence of this being a wider issue if you search online.

Gamespot has an article up for the very month that the drive issues began to be a major problem and you can find it here.

Closing Thoughts

To close up this article I want to make something clear. I’m in no way rooting for one team or another, we need both Nvidia and AMD to exist to create new hardware; otherwise we, the consumers are the ones that will suffer. I have only picked 3 instances where the Nvidia drivers were not up to scratch and there are definitely more. I also want to point out that I do acknowledge that AMD/ATI have their issues with drivers, but as this article aims to point out that Nvidia driver issues did and do exist, I only pointed the Nvidia cases.

The issue that I see is that whilst both teams have their high points and their low points, it seems to be far too common for the tech community to forget that Nvidia have their low points and just as common for the community to forget that AMD have their high points. For that matter I do admire the Cryptocurrency community as they will always take the hardware that provides them with the best performance and I do tip my hat to you all for doing that.

This concludes the first article that I’ve got for Steemit. What do you think? Does the perception of Nvidia's driver superiority match the reality? Or is reality somewhat different? Let me know in the comments below!

And if you have any tips on how to improve my articles, please let me know I look forward to growing as a writer with steemit!