Thin Red Line Posted September 27, 2009 Share Posted September 27, 2009 Hi, I'm planning to by a laptop and i'm looking forward to play the next CM game (Normandy). I remember there ATI card users met troubles in the CMX1 series (fog, etc) and there is again an ATI thread for CMSF. So i'm wondering if if Nvidia is a definitely better choice for CM players ? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted September 27, 2009 Share Posted September 27, 2009 In general, NVidia always had and still has the better drivers. In particular, NVidia was always better in keeping older games working, whereas ATI's quality assurance seems to consist of firing off today's top 5 games. Unfortunately, both are now at a pretty low level, NVidia's Vista drivers certainly weren't much to write home about. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phil stanbridge Posted September 27, 2009 Share Posted September 27, 2009 I've been playing SF on a Dell lappy with an ATI card and it's been pretty good. No problems with textures and it runs better than onboard. Admittedly there are issues with ATI and CMBB/CMAK but the problems are not major. I play CMBB/CMAK and SF on a desktop with Vista/Win 7 and a Nvidia 275 and it's a lot better. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted September 28, 2009 Share Posted September 28, 2009 As Redwolf pointed out, Nvidia in the past had a better track record with drivers and support of CMx1 and CMx2 features. ATI on the other hand has had bugs or missing feature in CMx1 and CMx2. The latest OpenGL bug prevents users from installing anything newer than the 9.3 Catalysts or doing a workaround. However ATI has been improving some things. For CMx1 there is fog graphics if you use a Radeon 9500 series or newer (this has been available for about 2 years). For CMx2 games ATI is slowly fixing their drivers (as far as we know). It may take a few months for some of these fixes to be released however. Nvidia at the moment has a lighting bug in their OpenGL drivers. How long this will last, we don't know. Sometimes when a bug exists in either manufacturer's drivers it takes awhile before we see a fix. ATI typically releases on a monthly schedule now, while Nvidia is a bit more intermittent. However it is often easier to get beta Nvidia drivers, so the possibility exists that you could run into some fixes sooner than you might from ATI, whose beta drivers are much more harder to come by. One thing that you may want to be aware of is finding a laptop manufacturer that can use the "reference" drivers. Both Nvidia and ATI have reference drivers for some of the mobile/laptop video chips, however not every manufacturer will allow you to use those drivers (customizations or other details prevent using anything other than OEM drivers). 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted September 29, 2009 Share Posted September 29, 2009 A laptop that actually doesn't run with the reference drivers should be outright excluded from buying choices. For Windows you tell it with a registry entry that you want to install the reference drivers. If they don't work afterwards that laptop should not be bought. You really don't want to depend on a slacker notebook vendor to re-do NVidia's drivers on every NVidia release - which they stop doing long before you stop using that notebook. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phil stanbridge Posted September 29, 2009 Share Posted September 29, 2009 Concur with the above statements. Just out of interest, laptopvideo2go is a good site for laptop VGA reference drivers. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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