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[Japo]

The topic is not about which manufacturer or model gives better performance, but any other aspect, specially it's stability (driver bugs) that I'm concerned with. But feel free to talk about anything you know or have experienced.

My computer came with an ATI Radeon HD 4670 512 MB GDDR3. I wasn't particularly worried about graphic performance, I don't play the newest games. The computer was a somewhat but not too high-end package two years ago, aimed at the professional (as opposed to gaming or home) market, and the graphic card was one of the things that I didn't opt for improving above the default package (for a supplement they offered a nVidia with 1 GB I think).

The specs are still today more than enough for me. The problem is that the retards at AMD are unable to publish drivers that are acceptably bug-free. I have experienced the following problems myself (I have Windows x64):

- Some very particular Adobe Flash content freezes the system completely and permanently, forcing a hard reset.

- One game might cause the mouse pointer graphic to get corrupted. It might return to normal without rebooting, but it's not clear what might make it do so--some posts I googled advise to move the mouse very fast, heh.

- Enabling and disabling extended desktop screws Windows Aero or something, causing the Windows Explorer to stop responding for a minute, and making the Vista Windows theme unavailable.

How can AMD provide this product with a straight face? Of course when I went to their website to download the latest drivers, which they update every few months, the changelogs talked about adding support for this and that game, and when I try and install the updates, it the basic bugs that prevent Windows from working aren't fixed! It's unfortunate for me that game performance are their priority, but inevitable. The real problem is the quality of their work, that software should never have been released without further bugfixing work.

Now I have un-installed all ATI software, reverted to the latest drivers approved by Windows Update--which of course have bugs too, since AMD hasn't made anything that works completely well--and I don't plan to update these drivers outside this channel.

I have vowed not to buy an ATI card ever again, but I regret very much having an ATI card in my main computer, even if I don't know the situation with nVidia or others; I'm even glad that I don't have AMD processors here or in the netbook. Dunno to me AMD has given the impression of a company overwhelmed by its competition. Currently Intel is very ahead of them in PC processors; they don't have a lot in mobile devices as far as I know; and on the graphic card market they have stiff competition too.