New drivers and a promise of more frequent updates from ATI

[HAL9000]

ATI has just release their new Catalyst driver suite. Not only do you get the latest software, you get the latest multimedia center and more frequent updates. They're claiming 8 to 10 per year. So if they keep up to this promise, all you NVidia guys that complain that ATI doesn't update enough just lost your arguenemt

I'm downloading them right now, but their servers must be busy. I usually get a 140k/s download from them.... I'm only getting 5k/s now

Just noticed, this download is good for both built by ATI products and powered by ATI products.

[DrZaius]

Yep, definately looks interesting from what I've read, sort of like ATI's version of the Detonator drivers. The benchmakrs I've seen thus far show definate performance gains. I'm probably going to load them as soon as the server load decreases.

[Paul H]

Thanks Hal;

I have 3 Radeon Cards (32DDR, 8500 Retail, 8500 LE) on 3 different OS's, I will try to get them updated and tested.

Ugh, maybe later... you weren't kidding, it sure is slow today. I usually get 300 - 600 KB/s from ATI and I am getting 2.63 right now at 8% complete.

[HAL9000]

I finally got them loaded. Added 600pts to my 3DMark2001 score.

Some notes I found and a few things I learned from experience;

1) Uninstall your previous video drivers prior to installing these ones
2) If you have the multimedia center 7.6, don't uninstall it. The one on the web site is an upgrade and the previous version must be installed.
3) Same applies for remote wonder users, version 1.1 must be previously installed.

[wolfie]

hi
has anybody else have problems putting in the new drivers? screwed my computer up.

wolfie

[HAL9000]

I was reading on a different board of some people having some problems with the install which is why it is extremely important that the previous drivers be removed. I guess some people have said it's recommended to edit out entries in the registry as well. I was running the ATI refresh fix program, so I was able to use the clean registry option which nukes all the registry entries.

[wolfie]

hi
finally got mine running. when you put these in make sure you have the ati drvers out and the reg. drivers running. thats where i made my mistake. had the ati ones out but the reg. ones didnt go in.and what a mess that caused. with those running it goes in pretty easy. i see they have some new stuff to tweak with. so i will have to try it out. not much improvement at 3dmark tho. yet!!

wolfie

[Paul H]

Hal, followed your installation instructions and 3 installs seemed to work without a hitch.

You got a 600Pt. improvement!? That's awsome. What card and what OS you running? Are you overclocking or tweaked? Did you have the latest drivers before that or the ones on your installation disk? All of mine had the latest drivers before catalyst came out. I got some improvement on one system and zilcho on the other two. I moved my 8500 le to an older system so I couldn't test these drivers under XP. But I was disappointed by the results so far. None of my video cards are being overclocked at all. Each system has the latest patch for 3DMark2001 se installed.

Radeon 8500 64MB retail / XP1800+ win 98 se, went down a few points.

Radeon 32DDR retail / duron 950/ win ME up 6 points

(Powered by) Radeon 8500 LE / Celeron 300a@464/ win 98 se went up 87 points.

Any suggestions?

[HAL9000]

I'm running a retail All-in-Wonder 7500 on a Pentium 4 1.7 running Windows XP Home. It's not overclocked nor is the video card tweaked. I am running the refresh fix program so that games (and 3DMark2001) run the monitor at the proper refresh rate instead of 60Hz.

I'm not sure why I got so much of a jump in my scores and why you got so little. The third one you listed is in reality a fair sized jump considering the processor you are running which probably cannot feed the 8500 chip fast enough to begin with.

[glc]

I had no problems in Win2K installing the driver - I uninstalled the old driver using add/remove programs, then rebooted. When the box came up to search for the VGA-compatible driver, I hit cancel and ran the new downloaded driver install. Rebooted and everything is just peachy.

[TimPoet]

Originally posted by HAL9000 I'm running a retail All-in-Wonder 7500 on a Pentium 4 1.7

On a Pentium???

*Incredulous*

[HAL9000]

Ummm... read closer Pentium 4 1.7

[TimPoet]

Oh, that's right, I think I remember you posting a couple of weeks ago that you overclocked that P4 1.7.

[DrZaius]

Just installed them on my Radeon LE and tested them out with Serious Sam 2. Didn't run any benchmarks but I noticed an improvement.

[MoxManiac]

Woohoo, these were released just in time for the Radeon 8500 that's on it's way to me