Release 3.10 ---- Ati's perfect drivers just got better..................... ???

[John Lewis]

From Avault:-

" ATI has issued the final release in the 3.X series of Catalyst
drivers. The next release will kick off the 4.X series. The current
version upgrades the Multimedia Center to version 8.8 and the Windows
driver to version 7.962. The new release also adds support for the
OpenGL Shading Language - a graphics programming language that allows
application developers to take advantage of the programmable vertex
and pixel processing units present in 3D graphics systems. ATI also
says the new drivers improve performance in various 2D applications by
as much as six percent across the entire RADEON product line. The new
drivers also incorporate various fixes for the following games:


Comanche 4
Madden 2004
Blade of Darkness
Battle Field 1942
Call of Duty
Flight Simulator 2004
Homeworld 2
Jedi Academy
Formula 1 2002
Lord of the Realms 3
4x4 Evolution
Indiana Jones
Morrowind
Halo Combat Evolved "

-------- end of quote............

Quite a list.

For me this comes as an interesting revelation. Compiled from
samplings of Ati-user comments on the Ati and nVidia newsgroups,
all of the above games ran perfectly under the previous Cat 3.x
drivers. Obviously Ati's recent Cat attempts have been so focussed
on Half-Life 2 optimizations that a few minor(?) things in the other
games must have escaped them. Misplaced shadows etc........
Now that HL2 is delayed, fingers are now available to plug other
leaking holes in their driver dike.

At least Ati is now making another attempt at a working
OpenGL port. Doom3 is obviously staring them down
the throat.

Maybe the 4.xx drivers will fix the rest of the latest games not
listed here. Also, by the time Release #10 of the 4.xx series
is available, OpenGL should be sorta working......

Now, which color hard-hat should I wear today ??

John Lewis

 

[Thomas A. Horsley]

Maybe the 4.xx drivers will fix the rest of the latest games not

listed here. Also, by the time Release #10 of the 4.xx series
is available, OpenGL should be sorta working......

Nonsense. After about 3 years of being optimistic all the problems will be
"fixed in the next release" I decided to freeze my system with the original
AIW Radeon in it at the last set of drivers which broke the smallest set of
the stuff I use regularly :-(.

Now I no longer have to keep reformatting my hard disk to eradicate every
trace of the lastest driver that broke more stuff than it fixed.

I just hang around this news group to see if a driver ever happens to
show up that no one complains about - I might be tempted to try it .
--email: (e-mail address removed) icbm: Delray Beach, FL |
<URL:http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley> Free Software and Politics <<==+

 

[-]

Norton Ghost/Drive Image is good to have since ATIs driver installations sux
big time.

To ATI if they read:
Do you ever test to install your drivers on any system running a previous
driver?

/ J

 

[rms]

FSAA in GrandPrixLegends is still broken. Lame!

rms

 

[Robert Pendell]

I never had any problems with ati's installers. I just made sure that I
uninstalled the drivers before installing a new set.

--
Robert Pendell
(e-mail address removed)
ICQ# 15670441
AIM: shinji2570
MSN: (e-mail address removed)
Yahoo: shinji2572000

 

[PB]

I never had any problems with ati's installers. I just made sure that I
uninstalled the drivers before installing a new set.

Which is absolutely ridiculous, thre should be no need to uninstall old
drivers to install new ones.

This is a computer, not a car, you have to strip a car before you can
repaint it, you have to remove the old tires to put new ones on, but there
is NO reason why an install program can't remove the old drivers and replace
them with new, * even * if it has to do two reboots to do it, although that
shouldn't be necessary either.

Every time I read this uninstall crap I regret my decision to give ATI
another chance.

DD

 

[J.Clarke]

Which is absolutely ridiculous, thre should be no need to uninstall
old drivers to install new ones.

This is a computer, not a car, you have to strip a car before you can
repaint it, you have to remove the old tires to put new ones on, but
there is NO reason why an install program can't remove the old drivers
and replace them with new, * even * if it has to do two reboots to do
it, although that shouldn't be necessary either.

Every time I read this uninstall crap I regret my decision to give ATI
another chance.

And you think that nvidia's drivers do any better?

 

[Strontium]

-
PB stood up at show-n-tell, in [email protected],
and said:

Which is absolutely ridiculous, thre should be no need to uninstall
old drivers to install new ones.

This is a computer, not a car, you have to strip a car before you can
repaint it, you have to remove the old tires to put new ones on, but
there is NO reason why an install program can't remove the old
drivers and replace them with new, * even * if it has to do two
reboots to do it, although that shouldn't be necessary either.

Every time I read this uninstall crap I regret my decision to give ATI
another chance.

Then why the **** are you hanging around this ng? Nothing better to do?

 

[Robert Pendell]

Hate to tell you this but I do the same thing with the Nvidia drivers. Only
I can't go so clean as I could with my ATI card. With my ati card, I did
some work and got rid of the Windows XP default drivers too so it would be
as clean of an install as possible. Generally, you should be able to just
upgrade the drivers but I always remove the old drivers before installing
new ones anyways. I have done this for every device. Not just video
drivers. I treat my sound drivers the same way.

--
Robert Pendell
(e-mail address removed)
ICQ# 15670441
AIM: shinji2570
MSN: (e-mail address removed)
Yahoo: shinji2572000

 

[John Lewis]

And you think that nvidia's drivers do any better?

Actually, yes.

I have a rather large game collection with many older DirectX
titles. Seem to all run just fine on a 5900/53.03 driver. Also,
no problem also with my OpenGl titles. Compatibility with both
new and legacy titles is very important to me. I pay good money
for my games and really enjoy going back and playing
classic titles on new hardware. nVidia seems to have done
an excellent job in their drivers for "covering the spread".

I am far more interested in the above capabililty than in
HL2 Pixel Shaders 2.0 /anisotropic-AA perfection. HL2
is just one over-hyped game.

Only exception is Glide, of course and I have an older
machine with Voodoo5/SBLive installed to handle both
Glide and DOS titles.

John Lewis

 

[Inglo]

Hate to tell you this but I do the same thing with the Nvidia drivers. Only
I can't go so clean as I could with my ATI card. With my ati card, I did
some work and got rid of the Windows XP default drivers too so it would be
as clean of an install as possible. Generally, you should be able to just
upgrade the drivers but I always remove the old drivers before installing
new ones anyways. I have done this for every device. Not just video
drivers. I treat my sound drivers the same way.

I take a different tack on this. While I've done the driver/registry
purge with both nVidia and ATI, I find it to be a waste of time. I'll
usually wait for something to go wrong before resorting to such an
approach. And usually when I go through all the driver cleaner I find
that something else was wrong.

 

[Noozer]

Which is absolutely ridiculous, thre should be no need to uninstall old
drivers to install new ones.

It's perfectly acceptable to require uninstalling old drivers before
installing new.

If you go from 2.9 to 3.8, how with the 3.8 know what to unload? What if you
just yanked a Matrox card out of your system? I guess you expect the 3.10
Catalysts to remove that too?

What should happen though is that windows shouldn't keep using the old
drivers if the old drivers aren't present. Also, if the driver detects an
old version it should warn the user. It would be great if the drivers had a
common uninstall hook that newer drivers could automatically call while they
are being loaded.

 

[J.Clarke]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003 06:23:11 GMT

Actually, yes.

I have a rather large game collection with many older DirectX
titles. Seem to all run just fine on a 5900/53.03 driver. Also,
no problem also with my OpenGl titles. Compatibility with both
new and legacy titles is very important to me. I pay good money
for my games and really enjoy going back and playing
classic titles on new hardware. nVidia seems to have done
an excellent job in their drivers for "covering the spread".

I am far more interested in the above capabililty than in
HL2 Pixel Shaders 2.0 /anisotropic-AA perfection. HL2
is just one over-hyped game.

Only exception is Glide, of course and I have an older
machine with Voodoo5/SBLive installed to handle both
Glide and DOS titles.

And of course you installed your 53.03 driver over an earlier driver
without clearing out the old driver? So if it's working for you why are
so many other people reporting problems with upgraded nvidia drivers
when they did not clean out the old ones first?

John Lewis

 

[J.Clarke]

It's perfectly acceptable to require uninstalling old drivers before
installing new.

If you go from 2.9 to 3.8, how with the 3.8 know what to unload?

If they are for the same brand of board one would hope that the
manufacturer of the board would know how to identify their own drivers
so as to be able to remove the old ones. Perhaps though doing such a
odd thing as keeping records is too much to ask.

What
if you just yanked a Matrox card out of your system? I guess you
expect the 3.10 Catalysts to remove that too?

What should happen though is that windows shouldn't keep using the old
drivers if the old drivers aren't present. Also, if the driver detects
an old version it should warn the user. It would be great if the
drivers had a common uninstall hook that newer drivers could
automatically call while they are being loaded.

Even if you run the uninstaller provided with the original drivers you
often have to then perform a second cleanup step using a third-party
utility.

 

[Lenny]

Every time I read this uninstall crap I regret my decision to give ATI
another chance.

Um, Nvidia recommends the exact same thing, so what are you whining about?

 

[Don Burnette]

Um, Nvidia recommends the exact same thing, so what are you whining
about?

I think he's just whining period.
Computers are designed to be - let's see - interactive! Sounds like he just
wants to watch it like a TV .

I even take uninstalling my drivers a step further, and I never have any
glitches - or at least none to date knock on wood.
I uninstall the control panel and the cat drivers, then reboot. When XP
finds new hardware, I click on cancel which brings me to a std vga screen.
I then run System Mechanic's registry cleaner, and obsolete file cleaner, to
clean out any remnants of ATI files. I then reboot again, cancelling out on
XP's finding new hardware again, and then from there I install the driver
software, reboot, install the control panel, reboot, then set my settings to
where I like them.

Yep, this takes about 10 minutes rather than 2, but is the way I prefer and
seems to work well for me.

Oh, and I gained about 180 3dmark 2003 points going from 3.9 to 3.10.
Not that that matters that mutch, but my games are working very well also.

I just wish they would fix the text corruption in Need For Speed
Underground, when 3d is set to anything other than high quality. Not that
big a deal, as I have some horsepower under the hood so it still runs very
well for me at high quality setting.

 

[Noozer]

What should happen though is that windows shouldn't keep using the old
Above should have been... "using the old drivers if the old hardware isn't
present."

Even if you run the uninstaller provided with the original drivers you
often have to then perform a second cleanup step using a third-party
utility.

This is 100% true. Add/Remove should REMOVE ALL of the driver... like it was
never ever in the PC.

 

[Skid]

This is 100% true. Add/Remove should REMOVE ALL of the driver... like it was
never ever in the PC.

"Shoulda', woulda'. coulda'" as Judge Judy often says. Add/Remove leaves
stray files, folders and registry entries behind when uninstalling a great
many pieces of software -- not just ATI drivers. That's why third-party
removal utilities and registry cleaners are popular.

Check the Norton forums sometime if you want to see people ranting about
what happens when they install system works over old versions. It can leave
the PC so screwed up that sometimes a reformat is the simplest cure. Yes,
the automated install is supposed to remove the old stuff. But it doesn't
always work, and people don't always read and follow directions.

If you're one of the unlucky victims of a terminal infection, you'll wind up
regretting not spending the extra minute or two to scrub up before surgery.

It's always simplest to install right over the old files. It's always safest
to uninstall then reinstall.

It's your choice, but those who take the easy way out should think twice
before blaming someone else for any problems that crop up later --
especially when you consider that the first troubleshooting advice anyone is
going to offer is to do a clean reinstall.