It's not always driver bugs. Many of the fixes are things that tapdance around bad, buggy code within the game itself. Oftentimes the studio's devs play fast and loose with shader parameters or API compliance- and NVidia does it differently than AMD, etc.

Any time you see a "MAY" within a standards document, it really ought to be treated as a "SHALL" unless you know you're working on ONLY a target environment that the "MAY" doesn't affect you. Prime example would be something along the lines of VBO mapping to host addressing space. The spec says that it MAY stall the pipeline if you do this while you're in the middle of a rendering pass. Well...NVidia's implementation knows what VBOs are in-flight with a rendering pass and will stall only if it's known to be about to be used by the current pass in progress. AMD's drivers took the other, in fact, sensible approach because it's easier to implement and gains you performance overall if you don't have devs doing stupid things- they stalled ANY time you mapped any VBOs involved with the rendering pass in progress.

A major studio (Who shall not be named, nor shall the game...who knows, maybe you can guess the title...) did this in their GL code- they recycled VBOs, but did it intra -frame instead of inter -frame. The first is realtively safe, producing pretty good performance, the other's very much not so, based on the lead-in I gave just now. I should know, I've used it with some of the games I've done porting work on (Because the studio did the same thing in DirectX...which has the same restrictions here...). When you do it intra-frame, on NVidia, it slows the render pass down, but not unacceptably because it only stalls as long as needed to assure you're not corrupting the render pass. AMD, until they re-worked their VBO implementation would plummet to seconds per frame slide-show renderings on an X1950XTX card when it was THE hottest, fastest card out there- because it would stall the pipeline, taking milliseconds to recover, each and every time they re-mapped the VBO they were re-using to conserve on card memory on the frame's rendering pass.

Was it the driver's fault? Not even remotely close to the truth there. But...people will blame the driver, calling it "buggy". In fact, that's what happend, even.

DirectTV has a satellite downlink, with their own satellites and antennas. AppleTV just has the Internet. Only in countries with net neutrality will Apple TV win out over the offerings of cable TV companies and telcos. The Comcast 300MB data cap is good for maybe 60-70 hours of HD video. Average American TV consumption is 5 hours a day.

If Michael White is that stupid then it explains a lot. The Direct TV UI is completely horrid in every way. The guide sucks the menus suck, the remote sucks. It's better than the garbage that Comcast has, but only marginally. All of the Cable or Satellite providers have the crappiest UI possible on their boxes. Because they refuse to spend any money on them so they have the box engineers simply slap one together for the least possible cost.

Apple is going to wipe the floor with them. If apple finds a way to have a $45.00 a month subscription to most of the desired channels out there but in a On demand form, They will utterly destroy Dish and the others.

No, my car doesn't have an OS. My TV is probably 50/50. The only OS I interact with on a daily basis is Linux. Unless you count firewalls which are IOS at work and OpenBSD at home. But I'm not sure I'd say I'm really interacting with them.

Not the case for Crysis 2. Crytek scaled it back a lot, and actually focused on making a game rather than just a tech demo. When it came out, it was DX9 only. Later they released a patch that introduced DX11 support and had some bigger textures, but at launch it was a DX9 title.

Well if you really are unable to do a minimal amount of research to find out, ok I guess that's a reason not to buy, but I would think it wouldn't be to hard to just, you know, look shit up. nVidia's site is a good place and not hard to get to.

Also if you are talking desktops, and I assume you are from the use of the term board, then you are talking nonsense. The rebranding has been in the laptop space, not the desktop space. With laptops they do have some mixed naming as there are 600 series parts from their 40nm and 28nm lines. With desktops all 600 series parts are 28nm.

Ultimately it really doesn't matter as what you should check are features and speed, not an arbitrary choice of what technology they use.

But whatever you like to justify your purchase decisions.

If it has graphical glitches, ya that's probably the game, Poor performance, depends on. The problem with Rage is it is OpenGL and AMD has shitty GL drivers, they have for a long time. nVidia has long had GL and DX drivers that performed equally, AMD has long had GL problems (used to be much worse than now).

If it is BSODs or GPU driver crashes though? No, that is 100% on the graphics drivers. No matter what the program does, it shouldn't bring the system down. Anything running in Ring 3 can't bring the system down without a problem form something in Ring 0, or a piece of hardware. That means the drivers (though they are largely Ring 3 these days) or card.

Drive quality has long been a problem with AMD (formerly ATi) graphics cards. There was a time when they were near unusable for anything but 2D. Some of the old Rage products you wanted to run with the included Windows drivers not the ATi provided ones because they had so many problems. They've gotten a lot better, but they still have more issues.

An example of a recent issue I've run in to was with Sony Vegas. It uses GPGPU to accelerate video effects. For nVidia, it uses CUDA, for AMD it uses OpenCL (since those are what they prefer). I was having all kinds of crashing issues with it on my work system, which had an AMD card. I tried disabling GPU acceleration, no crashes. So I tried an nVidia card in it. Again, no crashes. Not long after Sony released an update disabling a bunch of GPU effects on AMD cards until AMD fixed their driver (which they just did not long ago and Vegas has now reenabled the effects).

RIM thought the very same thing until Apple handed them their ass.

+1 insightful, although that's one reason linemen use safety belts.

If the stuff on the pole is 110V drops to the surrounding houses

It isn't. For one, drops to houses are 220V three phase, the house splits that into two 110V circuits. For another, that's the voltage that comes out of the "pole pigs", the trash-can sized cylindrical transformers which supply power to several adjacent houses. Transmission voltage between poles is going to be at least 440 V, and often higher.