Am 06.04.2010 12:02, * Peter Dassow:

Generally, no matter what gfx card you buy, you can expect that all
of them work fine with games and other applications. If it doesn't
then this is usually is no sign of incompatibility (even when it
looks like the easiest explanation), it simply is a bright sign
telling you that there is something wrong in your system.

That's what I call in german "frommer Wunsch" (can't translate it
directly, "wishful thinking" may be).

No, it's not a "frommer Wunsch" (for which "wishful thinking" would
indeed be the proper translation), it's simply a fact. You can be sure
that AMD wouldn't sell a single card if the compatibility with games
would be lacking, and it for sure would have been mentioned in any
review out there. This isn't the case, so either AMD is silently and
successfully bribing or threatening everyone to shut up, or the Radeon
cards work perfectly fine with the games out there. Out of own
experience I'd say the latter, unless you want to imply that all
magazines like the German c't Magazin (which like other magazines or
websites never mentioned any game compatibility issues with any ATI card
of the last decade or so) have been silenced by AMD.

Compatibility with games is always depending from the maturity of a
driver.

Not really, this comes down to driver quality and even more to how much
game developers deviate from common standardized APIs. In fact, driver
updates often fix problems that are actually in the games and only show
up in certain circumstances.

Driver maturity comes into play when new hardware has to be supported,
especially when the new card uses a completely new and different
architecture to the other supported cards. The result is usually a less
than optimal performance, however stability problems are very rare.
Therefore it is recommend to wait for at least a single subsequent
driver revision being available before buying a new gfx card,
irrespective of the brand.

In that case, may be it was related with the first AT catalyst driver
which supports the HD5770 also. But, *I* tested it more than twice, I
had *no* problems before using the HD5770, and afterwards, I had no
problems too with the above mentioned games. So it *must* be related
with the driver version I used,

Your logic is overly simplistic and narrow-minded, because you obviously
just didn't change the driver but also a piece of hardware (gfx card).
This alone changes a ****load of parameters which even when not seen by
you are still present (and those parameters aside, it could as well have
been a simple defective card which just would have needed replacement).
And not every problem has to be noticable by the user, for example some
memory problems might go unnoticed for years unless something in the
configuration changes.

and at this time, there was no other version which supports the
HD5770 (it was one version before 10.0 I remember).

So in short all you tried was a *single* driver release which as you say
was the first version actually supporting the at that time new Radeon
5700 series cards. This very much contradicts your former statement ("I
will go with nVidia for another reason: Because I made negative
expirience with so many Catalyst driver versions I can't count.") which
following your own other statements seems to be a blatant lie.

Usually I am always trying to get rid of the drivers of the "old"
card before swapping to the new video card. So I used uninstall AND a
specific nVidia driver cleaning tool. That's all you can do (or do
you always reinstalling Windows just for swapping a video card ?
Ridiculous...).

No, you don't need to re-install Windows for swapping a gfx card. But
you should be sure to really remove old drivers completely, otherwise
issues can arise (even when going from ATI to Nvidia). Also, software
that likes to interfere with the removal process (like virus scanners or
the widespread pseudo-security suites) should be deactivated beforehand,
or the removal may end up being not as complete as one might think.

It seems you're a convinced ATI fan, so I should try to talk about it
further.

No, I'm not. In fact, the majority of my computers run Nvidia cards.
However, having developed quite a bit of hardware and software myself
and due to my experience with a noticable amount of systems I know of
the issues of both camps, and therefore I probably have a less
simplistic way than "ATI is just crap", and I don't have to define
myself over the brand name on the gfx card.

But then, *someone* has to buy the overpriced GTX480 cards ;-)

Ben