New ATI Catalyst Drivers

I wish they'd dump that dot net shit and streamline their drivers, GEEKS hate bloat, except it's not so bad on the chick across the bar after 10 drinks or so, but not in drivers

does anyone ever bother to actually install all that other crap besides the display drivers?

I'm glad I switched back to Nvidia, no more bloated CCC for me.

All I gotta say is these drivers don't fix the Screwy Textures I am seeing in Quake 4 in the outside portion leading to the Stroog Gun Turret...

Doom 3 & PREY (demo) are fine....

To me, ATI has always had quality drivers(never had their cards/drivers pre 9x00, so I can't respond to the poor drivers they had back in the day). I loved getting that fast 9800 Pro...their drivers never had any problems with games, etc. Were always stable, and I loved that feature where if the card got into an infinite loop, I wouldn't have to restart my system, and the card would reset itself instead.

Right now I have the 7800GTX, and I have gotten crashes here and there...once a week give or take a few sounds about right, depending on the game, and whether or not I've messed around with the ini files, added mods, etc that possibly make it unstable. However, not having to restart my computer was just one of those huge plusses that you miss when you no longer have the feature.

I am currently using the 84.45 beta Forceware drivers, and fear upgrading my drivers to the 9x.xx Forceware WHQL that was just released because so many bugs that were present in the 9x.xx beta made it to the WHQL version. A lot of people claimed that the beta damaged their video cards that ran perfectly before hand, but after updating their drivers to the new 9x.xx ones, had permenant problems that couldn't be fixed by falling back to older drivers. Along with a whole bunch of instability problems, and just plain annoying "sli warnings" when you don't have SLI enabled, or even when you have only one video card installed, apparently a popup bubble comes up warning you, and if you click on it, it apparently takes you to the Nvidia website.

Though I never tried the 9x.xx drivers out of fear, there are enough reports that make me doubt Nvidia's quality, and that they are trying to take the performence crown at the cost of damaging the cards through driver updates. After all, a lot of people said that the drivers gave them a nice FPS boost after installing the new WHQL drivers, but at what cost?

Personally, I think this is the last Nvidia card that will be in my computer. The next one will without a doubt be the long awaited R600(been waiting for it for a good 2-3 years).

I must also commend ATI for communicating with their customers/fans in various forums about problems, and trying to help them, and just showing interest in the community. It is nice to know that they are taking that extra bit of time out of the day to help people pinpoint problems, and figure out solutions to them. The forum I am most aware of that has frequent posts from ATI is www.driverheaven.net

Anyways, I apologize for the long post, but I envy the products that ATI has come out with, and can't wait to have a bit more red in my computer, and less green

:)

I'm a little new to the whole ATI thing. How often do the Omega Drivers come out?

lol no kidding nVidia's new .Net panel is worse than the CCC interface.

I wonder when they're going to fix the problems with Windows 2000. They still link you to the 6.2 drivers, which is due to some kind of problem that needs to be fixed.

Poor bastards asked me to fill out a survey. They shoulda known better. I'm sure I wrote out 128k on the CCC alone.

I think a lot of people just use the complete installer nowadays, including the bloated PoS CCC

I'm running the pure driver and an old control panel (from 5.11 I think), together with the Ati Tray Tools that's more than enough to set video options to my likings

not that the newest Catalysts do much for my Radeon 9800XT anyway...