AMD cards have better price/performance ratio and drivers have been good for many years. Both companies have occasional problems with drivers but in the end drivers from both companies are good. (only had minor fixable problems with amd and nvidia drivers so far)

Nvidia does have better marketing and more fanboys though.

This is a different problem and is common to every crossfire/SLI setup. If you want to fix it you have to play with tools like radeon pro.

You will get spikes in every card from every manufacturer. Its not like the workload never changes.Sometimes it just takes longer to render a frame.

If they fix Enduro then yes. They started fixing the damn thing recently so i guess the answer will be yes.

You are refering to techreport articles right? There might be a problem or there might not be. I certainly havent seen any micro-stuttering with my hd7850. The type of tests they do are veeeeeery easy to manipulate. You just have to select a different short scene to render if you dont like the results and voila the other card wins. Average framerates might not tell you everything but atleast they are harder to manipulate. (though techreport still has a tendency to measure much lower average FPS for AMD than competing review sites)

When it comes to mobile they certainly lost. Enduro is still a work in progress while nvidias optimus works (unless you are using linux :) ).

When it comes to desktops i think they provide a better value than nvidias current offerings.

7990 exists but its not exactly a high volume product. You can of course buy it if you are rich enough.

I had a hd4870. Same chip as the hd4850 and i had no crashes.

I have some serious doubts about this kind of testing.

- he is using different thresholds in different games.
- he is using fraps to measure it, but fraps only records part of the process
- he is testing with vsync off, which is weird considering he is trying to measure smoothness
- his average FPS numbers for AMD card are much lower than in reviews from other sites

Are his tests always reproducable (spikes always occur at the same spot)?
Why such a small selection of games?

The way this test is constructed means that a hypothetical card that always outputs at 20 fps will be better than a hypothetical card that outputs 1000fps but had one frame rendered in 19fps (if threshold was at 20).

Im sorry but im going to stick with the usual min/average/max fps tests. I have a slower 7850 card and i have no problems with smoothness, yet according to those graphs it should be VERY visible.

Optimizations are there because of poorly coded games and not for the purpose of cheating. The days of cheating are long gone.

I have a 7850 which is a slower card than the one tested. None of what he talks about can be seen while playing.

Cant say really. Ive had r8500, r9700, x700, hd4870 and now hd 7850 and ive never had any problems with drivers that a simple upgrade to the latest version didnt fix. Maybe im just lucky who knows.

Dont have much experience with nvidia cards. Only had (still have them) 6600gt, 6800something and a HTPC with ion chipset. No major problems here as well. I had an occasional driver crash with 6600, 6800 was in my work computer so not exactly heavily used and the HTPC needs a driver reinstall once monthly because HDMI audio just stops working. Not bad IMO.

The intel gfx in my current work computer is a bit crashy though. It doesnt like java applications for some reason. :)

Heh. my thoughts exactly. This is the second such article in like a week. Something fishy about it all. Im not saying that AMDs drivers are perfect but i cant say ive had any problems with them in the last 10 years. The last time i remember them crashing was like 7 years ago while using the old radeon 8500. Crashed during counterstrike. It wasnt even a BSOD just a driver restart. Miraculously once the picture was back i was still alive. :)

The drivers used to be bad but that was during the rage3d era. Im sure half of slashdot users are too young to even remember that those cards existed.

I dont know why Nvidia is regarded so highly. During the vista era the majority of BSODs were because of their drivers. Thats pretty bad considering the amount of drivers running on a computer.

Cant say ive had much trouble personally with nvidia as well. My old 6600gt worked okayish. BSOD once a month. Annoying but bearable. My Nvidia ION based HTPC also works most of the time. A lot of problems with their HDMI audio drivers. I have to reinstall the damn driver once a month because it just stops working. Since ive figured it out that i should just run the install again and it works then its not much of a problem anymore.

Its cause we dont have these problems. Ive had mostly AMD/ATI cards in my main machine and ive not had many problems. Same when i used nvidia. Funnily enough ive had more crashes and annoyoing bugs with nvidia cards. Nothing major though.

I have this problem as well. It has nothing to do with slashdot because it happens randomly even with no open tabs. It started happening after version 5 as far as i can recall. Funnily enough it only happens on my work computer (crappy P4) and not on my much faster home computer. Perhaps it still happens but i dont notice it because of a faster processor.