Best drivers for ATI X1950 Pro PCI-E card

[Mikester71]

I am currently upgrading my video card from a PowerColor x800xl PCI-E
to an ATI x1950 Pro 256mb GDDR3 PCI-E card and was wondering what
drivers work best for this particular card. I currently have the Omega
2.6.87 driver (CATALYST version Omega 5.12) installed with the x800xl
card and have had no real problems with them. I installed it upon
purchase of the card and have been using ATiTool 0.24 to OC the card
and adjust fan temps and stuff like that.

Why I am asking is because I read that ATITool does not support the
X1950 Pro card and I also read something on here about the latest
Catalyst drivers not supporting the Pro version of the X1950 card. Does
that mean that I should just load the drivers from the CD included in
the box with the card or is it worth looking into using the Omega
drivers for this card? I loaded the latest drivers from ATI's site on
my son's machine, which has a recently added ATI x1950 Pro card, and
everything seems to be working okay on his machine.

Any advice or personal experiences with these drivers would be much
appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Marc_Ragusa]

The X1950 Pro is currently not compatible with the standard Catalyst
Driver 6.12 as stated (or at least implied) on their website here:

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=23582

and here

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/xp/radeonxip-xp.html

I've tried and the current Catalyst drivers won't install or install
improperly. I'm using the version on the CDROM.

I'm very annoyed that we can't use the regularly updated drivers.

I've contacted ATI (now AMD) support, and they're clueless.

 

[Mikester71]

Thanks Marc for the reply. The thing is I am 98% sure that I have the
6.12 drivers installed on my son's computer which is also running a
X1950 Pro card too. And he has had no troubles playing games like
Oblivion, Prey, Battlefield 2142, Company Of Heroes with the settings
cranked mostly up to high. I loaded the latest drivers right from ATI's
website before reading about the supposed driver problem with the
X1950.

Mike

 

[William]

Thanks Marc for the reply. The thing is I am 98% sure that I have the
6.12 drivers installed on my son's computer which is also running a
X1950 Pro card too. And he has had no troubles playing games like
Oblivion, Prey, Battlefield 2142, Company Of Heroes with the settings
cranked mostly up to high. I loaded the latest drivers right from ATI's
website before reading about the supposed driver problem with the
X1950.

Mike

Mike:

Mikester is correct. Even though you have installed the latest driver
package from ATI, only the CCC center was updated. You got no new drivers
for 2D/3D or OpenGL installed. You can confirm this by going to the CCC and
looking under the Information Center - Graphics Software window and confirm
this. You will see that CATALYST Version is listed as 06.12, the newest
version you just installed, BUT under 2D Driver / Direct 3D Version / and
OpenGL Version you will find 6.14.xxxxxx listed, which is the version that
came on the CD rom with the card.

This is confusing, because the 6.14 number on the 2d/3d versions are two
more irritations ahead of where the CCC is currently. I can only hope their
is 'method to this madness' and when CCC catches up to 6.14 we may finally
see updates for the x1950 pro. We can only hope.

One reason for these problems, is that the x1950 pro is a new GPU design,
one that ATI is changing over to in their graphics product line. Perhaps as
more cards are sold based on this design we will see better support.

I run this board on Oblivion and Fear all the time and am amazed at its
speed. Of course, having a Core 2 Dual e6600 helps too.

An interesting side note. I run two monitors on my system, and lately I
have left running a system monitor on my no-game monitor while playing
Oblivion, allowing me to see the CPU usage, Physical RAM, and Swap file
usage while running this game. It is amazing just how much cpu and ram this
games take advantage of. CPU is running at 65 to 70%, and ram starts at
900meg and goes up to 1.5 gig as the game get going. These numbers
represent system usage, system monitor usage, and Oblivion usage combined.

William

 

[Mikester71]

Mike:

Mikester is correct. Even though you have installed the latest driver
package from ATI, only the CCC center was updated. You got no new drivers
for 2D/3D or OpenGL installed. You can confirm this by going to the CCC and
looking under the Information Center - Graphics Software window and confirm
this. You will see that CATALYST Version is listed as 06.12, the newest
version you just installed, BUT under 2D Driver / Direct 3D Version / and
OpenGL Version you will find 6.14.xxxxxx listed, which is the version that
came on the CD rom with the card.

This is confusing, because the 6.14 number on the 2d/3d versions are two
more irritations ahead of where the CCC is currently. I can only hope their
is 'method to this madness' and when CCC catches up to 6.14 we may finally
see updates for the x1950 pro. We can only hope.

One reason for these problems, is that the x1950 pro is a new GPU design,
one that ATI is changing over to in their graphics product line. Perhaps as
more cards are sold based on this design we will see better support.

I run this board on Oblivion and Fear all the time and am amazed at its
speed. Of course, having a Core 2 Dual e6600 helps too.

An interesting side note. I run two monitors on my system, and lately I
have left running a system monitor on my no-game monitor while playing
Oblivion, allowing me to see the CPU usage, Physical RAM, and Swap file
usage while running this game. It is amazing just how much cpu and ram this
games take advantage of. CPU is running at 65 to 70%, and ram starts at
900meg and goes up to 1.5 gig as the game get going. These numbers
represent system usage, system monitor usage, and Oblivion usage combined.

William

Hey, thanks alot William. That really helped to shed some light on
ATI's madness for me. I, too was wondering why the version numbers
didn't quite match up. Yours is one of the first replies I have read
that really answered alot of my questions.

As I stated, his machine seems to be running okay with the graphics
maxed out on most of his games (Oblivion, BF 2142, Company Of Heroes),
mind you he too has a dual core 3 ghz processor. He only has 1gb of RAM
which would explain if he did have any bottleneck with any of these
games though, right?

My worry is that I bought an ATI x1950 Pro for myself also to replace
my PowerColor x800xl card and was wondering which drivers are the best
ones for me to load on my machine considering that I haven't really had
any problems running the x800xl on my machine (price was too good to
pass up for another x1950 Pro though, $199 Canadian). I use the Omega
drivers with my x800xl and wondered if I should try them with the new
card or just load the drivers for the x1950 Pro from the driver CD
included in the box with the x1950 Pro?

Thanks again for the insight! Wonderful stuff.

Mike

 

[William]

<snip>

He only has 1gb of RAM

which would explain if he did have any bottleneck with any of these
games though, right?

Yes, having only 1gb of ram will require swapfile use to keep things going.
Which brings your hard drive and its performance into play for
responsiveness. (It amazes me saying this, that 1gb of ram is no longer
enough on modern computers to play current games at maximum performance. But
here we are.)

My worry is that I bought an ATI x1950 Pro for myself also to replace
my PowerColor x800xl card and was wondering which drivers are the best
ones for me to load on my machine considering that I haven't really had
any problems running the x800xl on my machine (price was too good to
pass up for another x1950 Pro though, $199 Canadian). I use the Omega
drivers with my x800xl and wondered if I should try them with the new
card or just load the drivers for the x1950 Pro from the driver CD
included in the box with the x1950 Pro?

I do not believe that Omega has released drivers for the x1950 pro as of
yet. Haven't heard anyone say so. You will need to use the drivers on the
CD with the board if you want the advanced features to work. Keep in mind,
this is a new GPU, with new fancy stuff in it. Go ahead and update CCC if
you want to - it loads faster now.

William

 

[Mikester71]

Yes, having only 1gb of ram will require swapfile use to keep things going.

Which brings your hard drive and its performance into play for
responsiveness. (It amazes me saying this, that 1gb of ram is no longer
enough on modern computers to play current games at maximum performance. But
here we are.)

I do not believe that Omega has released drivers for the x1950 pro as of
yet. Haven't heard anyone say so. You will need to use the drivers on the
CD with the board if you want the advanced features to work. Keep in mind,
this is a new GPU, with new fancy stuff in it. Go ahead and update CCC if
you want to - it loads faster now.

William

Okay, cool. Thanks again William for the fast response. I am a bit
better off than my son with 2gb of DDR ram, so I may look at upgrading
his ram down the road here.

What's crazy is that he is only 10 years old and already has a dual
core 3ghz, P4 with the ATI X1950 Pro card (which he bought himself with
his paperboy money) and 1gb of Ram. It took me 35 years to achieve this
much power!

Mike

 

[Ron Krebs]

Okay, cool. Thanks again William for the fast response. I am a bit
better off than my son with 2gb of DDR ram, so I may look at upgrading
his ram down the road here.

What's crazy is that he is only 10 years old and already has a dual
core 3ghz, P4 with the ATI X1950 Pro card (which he bought himself with
his paperboy money) and 1gb of Ram. It took me 35 years to achieve this
much power!

Mike

No, what's crazy is that when your son is a teenager, he'll be laughing with
his friends about the crummy, cheap, and excruciatingly slow system he had
when he was 10!!

Ron

 

[Mikester71]

No, what's crazy is that when your son is a teenager, he'll be laughing with

his friends about the crummy, cheap, and excruciatingly slow system he had
when he was 10!!

Ron

True, how very true Ron!

Mike