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[Pemalite]

Chazore said:

Pemalite said:

Drivers are complex pieces of software these days... It takes a Shit-ton (Australian standard unit of measurement) to build a competent driver stack.
AMD and nVidia drivers for example have more lines of code than some older Windows kernels which are also monolithic.
AMD and nVidia have also been doing this for decades, so they have a solid foundation and experienced driver teams to draw from.. But even they can sometimes miss things... I.E. Frame pacing with the Radeon 7000 series.

It will take time for them to build drivers optimized for gaming, Intel has never done it before...
They have always optimized their drivers for a very specific and small selection of games that might top out at a couple dozen, professional use cases (I.E. Video encoding) and that is it... They just move onto the next thing.

Honestly though, until their GPU's are releasing on a reliable cadence and have been thoroughly tested... To ensure long term support (As they have a history of giving up) I would avoid at all costs.

Ngl, but over the past few years, nvidia drivers have felt like a bit off a hit n' miss. There have been times where a driver for a slew of new games doesn't certify as "game ready" (I still have Wolfenstein TNC fresh in my mind and the two fuck-up hotfixes that followed just for that game at the time of it's release), and then there are drivers that fuck up older games (multiple drivers that dicked around with Supreme Commander series), and then there's people noticing previous gen cards getting stumped by driver releases over time (like the 1000 series, and other 1080ti owners are feeling like they are being gimped slowly over time to make the new cards forcefully appealing). 

I remember years ago that it was AMD that was made fun of for bad drivers or gimped cards via drivers, but Nvidia feels like king of the hill for that title over the past 4-5 years now. When are they going to not fuck up 2-3 drivers in a row?. If their code is as big as you say it is, that sounds like a hurdle of a problem that they should really be slimming down. 

Bad drivers from any manufacturer isn't a new thing.

nVidia for example was responsible for almost 30% of Windows Vista's crashes.
https://www.engadget.com/2008-03-27-nvidia-drivers-responsible-for-nearly-30-of-vista-crashes-in-20.html

But go back further and ATI had far buggier drivers than nVidia in the Geforce 3/4/5(FX) days even though they had a few extra "tricks" that nVidia didn't such as Tessellation. (And despite nVidia doing driver tweaks/cheats to increase performance, something AMD would do with the Radeon 2900 series.)

Intel is an oddball, they will release a driver as a bare-bones thing, for example with the x3100 the driver didn't release with TnL of Vertex support... BUt later was very well optimized for games like Half Life 2...  But once you ran any game that had a 2D overlay over a 3D render... Even a decade old game, the performance would tank.
But it had solid 2D and video support from the outset.

S3 fantastically imploded with it's Savage by never ever enabling TnL, Matrox always prioritized 2D acceleration even today.

But even if you go over towards the Audio side... Creative have a fantastic history of bad drivers.

AMD and nVidia just leapfrog each other with driver quality, always have, always will.
I will just keep buying whoever is cheapest as I can usually work around bad drivers to a degree.