Long Time Nvidia User About To Get A Radeon 9800

[RoboJoe32]

Well, My brother is selling me his videocard cheap (He never plays games or uses the card's full potential for anything) And are there any important things I need to know when I install it?

Latest and or special drivers?

Overclocking and videoquality tweaks? (non-application controlled AA etc.?)

How to remove existing Nvidia drivers to avoid a conflict?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Horscht]

well, personally I would never use an ATI card anymore (I just got bad experiences with it), since the Hardware might be superior to NVIDIA cards, but the drivers are just a piece of crap! For example,every time I try to run Painkiller on my ATI machine, it just crashes. The game works flawlessly on my NVIDIA GEFORCE FX 5200 machine, allthough some games are slower (Some are only playable on 1024*7hundredandsomething), But more games run at all (Painkiller, Far cry, true crime, GTA3 (doesn´t run properly on my ATI machine, weird slowdowns))

 

[RoboJoe32]

Sounds more like a wonky driver issue, My Geforce 4 4200 ti 128MB got iffy with the new drivers, So had to stick with the ones that came on the disk.

 

[Horscht]

well, ALL ATI drivers are wonky! I tried several versions of teh driver, including the latest, and all don´t work. In fact, now im not able to replace the driver again (i tried an older one at last). It either tells me "remove the old driver firts" or "no corespinding Hardware/software found" (then i have to use system recovery to get the driver back again).

 

[Kop_007]

I have had a few Nvidia and a one ATI over the years. My current card is ATI.

Doesnt make any differnece to me.

 

[skysnapper]

ATI 9700 best gfx card i have owned runs games fautlessly, had quite a few issues with my 8500 but the current one runs like a dream, ATI havin wonky drivers is a thing of the past these days.

use driver cleaner to get rid of your old drivers in fact use it whenever your updating your drivers..

http://www.driverheaven.net/cleaner/

 

[RoboJoe32]

Ah ok, thanks. That's really all I needed.

Any programs or tweaks for soft-OC'ing? (nvidia has coolbits, ATI has?)

 

[skysnapper]

think its called radlinker... not 100% sure .. go to rage3d.com you should find some OC utils there.

 

[RoboJoe32]

Thanks again!

 

[Klown]

ATI drivers are of very high quality now.

 

[Swiss_Cheeseman]

ATI drivers are of very high quality now.

I wouldn't go that far. Their D3D drivers are better than nvidias, but OpenGL is lagging behind somewhat.