Bloat or not, haven’t bluescreened or froze nearly as much or as badly as my ATi cards ever did.
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I think you misread him there bro. Hes saying anti drivers are unstable compared to nvidia, even when those are becoming bloated over the years.
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Just saying my experience which unfortunately still seems to ring true nowadays. AMD can make some awesome hardware, but their driver side of the house has always suffered. If they turn around that trend, then Nvidia would have to really compete price-wise. As it stands, Nvidia pretty much knows they can charge what they want because AMD/ATi cards have a reputation for poor driver support and functionality. There’s a lot to be said for being able to plug in and go rather than having to tweak and troubleshoot.
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ATI/AMD yes.
Earlier this year (2019 - damn time flies!) I had a driver on my work workstation (Radeon WX1200) that failed to render HTML tables properly. Not the browser - same issue in Chrome, Firefox, Edge and IE.
Update solved that, but still. I can share a photo I took with my phone, it looked like a gasoline spill on asphalt mixed with oil.
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This spurred me to look up the latest/greatest AMD/ATi cards and unfortunately the user reports are still there: cards have constant heat problems, tons of driver problems inducing crashing, etc., tweaking required to get fans to run fast enough to keep card cool, and incredible power demands. Suffice to say that Nvidia pretty much dominates the market right now unless AMD can turn it around and quickly.
What that means for the RTX 3000 series: open your wallets, gents. Or sell a kidney.
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I’ve been using ATI/AMD cards exclusively up to my current 970 and i can’t say i’ve had all that many issues. Like with nVidia, if you buy reference coolers, you may be in for a problem.
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I think what he’s saying is that he’s a nutter with more money than sense. Well. Can’t fault a guy for knowing himself and not being ashamed of it, yeah?
Me, I’m a nutter with neither sense nor money, so I’m pinching pennies and putting 'em all in a sock for the day I can give all of it to the Chinese god of chips and get me into that 3080 nirvana too.
I once had a radeon card, and it was fine, but the last six or so generations, afaik ATI is lagging behind on the performance front, so yeah. They are doing well on the CPU front I heard. Might look into those when it’s time to build the new box.
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I’m still depressed I can’t buy a 3DFx card anymore.
My Voodoo 5 was awesome. We could be on the Voodoo 25 now!
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Amen. Voodoo5 was the most expensive bit of hardware I ever owned.
^ This!
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Well, since Nvidia bought 3dFX, technically the card lineage in question is about like that, give or take a generation.
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nvidia took what they wanted from 3DFx’s patents, but I don’t think we could say any of their chips was a renamed Voodoo 6 or anything.
I think they used some of that for FSAA implementations, but I always thought the Glide stuff worked much better than the D3D of the era.
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Yes it did but coulda been woulda been, b12 still is right, we are living in a glorious golden age of sims. From high quality machines sticks and rudders to actual honest to God VR, it’s just awesome.
The only thing we miss compared to aces over the Pacific is that cool “there I was” screen for setting up an instant action.
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See, my problem with that classification is the selection.
Would you say you were living in a golden age of food if there were only 2 restaurants in your entire city that were great? Meanwhile all the rest shuttered leaving you just fast food? Hope you like French and Mexican, because there are no Greek or American or Italian (other than a pizza place) or anything else.
The golden age of science fiction wasn’t a pair of writers releasing a book every other year, there were dozens of writers releasing good stuff.
I called the 90s the golden age because at some points you could pick up a new flight sim at the store every month. Maybe it was good, maybe it wasn’t, but you wouldn’t be bummed if it sucked because something new would show next month. You got to pick the ones you wanted to fly and ignore the rest, you didn’t feel obligated to buy one just to support the dev in the hopes they’d make the one you REALLY wanted next.
What we have now is good if that’s what you like. WWII? If you don’t want N Africa or PacWar or Italy, ok. Mostly E Europe with a little W Europe only. WWI? FC1 is a good start, but you still need the older RoF if you want something complete.
Do you want a Vietnam sim? Other than an old copy of SF2: Vietnam, your only choice is to fly the MiG-21 in DCS against AI B-52s, F-4s and F-5s over terrain you can pretend is SE Asia.
Do you want a Korean War sim? Again, MiG-15 or F-86 only fighting each other (no other birds from that era, even AI) over terrain you can pretend is Korea.
We have depth, but we have no breadth. Even DCS is a hodgepodge that requires a lot of thought from the mission makers to do it right. We should have at least 5 sim makers out there churning out different types of sims, not just 2. We spent 2 decades flying Japanese planes in AOTP, PAW1942, CFS2, and Il-2PF, now we can’t get any because it costs too much to research and translate the documents needed to get to an arbitrary level of accuracy? Obvious answer is DON’T. War Thunder creates every plane under the sun and throws them into an arcade world, how about we get some of them in Il-2 where we can use them more tactically?
I would rather get a PacWar sim with planes having guesswork for a system or 3 than NO PacWar sim.
The perfect is the enemy of the “good enough for $60 entertainment software.”
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That’s a good point, @JediMaster.
The sims we have today are better than what we used to have, but we don’t have as many sims as we used to.
And what we have gained in study level simulation, we have lost the storytelling and game part of the simulation.
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Yeah, I didn’t really touch on the game part. The last sim to really attempt that was CFS3. It’s a Russian thing, though. Starting with Flanker and going through all the Il-2 and RoF releases, you never doubt that you’re in a simulator. I remember when Flanker came out in 1995 how it stood out for being so different when you weren’t in the pit.
Some of the older sims did a good job of making you feel like you were roleplaying a pilot flying in a conflict. Everything you did, in or out of the pit, contributed to that feeling.
The newer ones make you feel like you’re a real pilot training in a sim for proficiency. If you’re not in the pit, you’re navigating sterile menus and interfaces that get the job done but have no contribution to the atmosphere.
It must be a cultural thing as all these different Russian developers all do it the same way. It just doesn’t bother them, I guess. The Jane’s/Origin, Sierra/Dynamix, LucasArts, Novalogic, and MPS sims were the best at this. SH, DI, DID, iMagic, Rowan, MS, and most of the others were ok.
So many of them made sims that were just “meh” in the pit when it came to modeling the planes and graphics, but the rest of the game that surrounded that was so good you forgave it. No one cared about the EGT on the engines in the A-10 in the Sierra sim. No one even cared you had a copilot who talked to you! 
It was just a great game despite those flaws.
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Was that the one where they hired a Top Gun actor to do some voiceovers? Was it Ironside…?
There were an A-10 sim with one in it, I remember…
There was a Top Gun sim in the mid-90s, was it SH that did it? Definitely casual but so tough I never finished the campaign, got stuck.
I don’t recall a voice in an A-10 sim, I thought it was nonverbal “popup window” text only?
I vaguely remember the Top Gun one, was it the folks who did Back to Baghdad? As I remember it did have some good voicing. My computer could barely run it if I remember right.