Switching from nvidia to ATI
 

Hi all,

Time to retire my 8800 GTS. My 4870 will be here monday. Last ATI card I owned was a 9700 pro. I have absolutely zero brand loyalty. I go with the best of each gen.

So, what are the pitfalls, hassles of swapping out an nvidia card for an ATI. Should I reformat or will an uninstall and driver clean work?

No you don't need to reformat - You can try this:
Guru3D - Driver Sweeper

It's possible to do a straight switch, but not advisable. Things will likely get gunged up...fresh install is the best policy, just remember to backup.:biggrin: GL

Thanks.
I'll do the driver clean first. If I have grief I will format.

Depends how long you haven't reformatted.....if it's been a while I'd just reformat haha

I just did the very same thing recently. I first uninstalled the Nvidia drivers, then rebooted in safe mode. There I ran Driver Cleaner to remove anything Nvidia still hanging around. Rebooted back into regular XP, and then ran Crap Cleaner to clear out the registry and any Nvidia dll's. Lastly I searched the registry manually and the hard-drive, and delete any files/entries/whatever that related to Nvidia. One final reboot to start clean and then I installed the new card, and installed the ATI drivers, and everything ran fine.

If you play a lot of games, most should reconfigure themselves properly for your new hardware, but some may freak out because they were configured for your Nvidia hardware when you installed them. If this sort of thing happens, delete any config/cfg/ini files that the games use to store settings and you should be good.

I just like to format so I'm safe, I always worry that even if something dosn't screw up that maybe I'll take an unknown performance hit.

I hope I don't have to reformat. I've got 5 OSes on this comp.

There is a procedure I always follow when installing new drivers, so it should be the same for switching cards. This is a post on the evga forums, so naturally it is specific to nvidia cards, but the procedure is still a good one to follow.
Updating/Installing/Possibly Fixing 8 Series Drivers

Thanks Mibs, that is what I did. For all my OS's. XP pro 32 for work. XP lite 32 for gaming, xp 64, vista 32 and vista 64. Not one problem with any of those builds.

Great card! My 8800 GTS 640 watercooled at 680/1000 scored 49 fps in mass effect, 28 in Crysis @ 1920x1200. This card did 62 and 34 fps in those same benches at stock speeds. Cod4 is off the hook, 80+ fps at 1920x1200 with 4xAA and max anisio.

Stable at 680/1050 now. Today I'm going to slap on my watercooling and volt mod it. Going for the 850mhz core. If any of the big fall titles bring this thing to its knees I'll slap in another.