Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: deep_eyes on April 12, 2004, 12:45:28 pm
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(if you havent already gotten the new catalyst drivers)....
New ATI Drivers Comment! (4/7/04)
ATI has released their latest Catalyst drivers, which is version 4.4. If you have an ATI card, check out the changes/fixes below:
Connecting a secondary CRT and enabling VPU Recover no longer results in the operating system failing to restore itself
The new rotation implementation no longer fails to update the desktop when doing a mode set on exit
Setting the display resolution to 1024x768 32bpp and switching the DVI connector for HDTV to 480i no longer results in the HDTV device not working within the ATI Control Panel
Setting the display resolution to 1152x864 32bpp under Windows XP and playing an MPEG or AVI file using the Windows Media Player no longer results in display corruption on the TV output
Setting the display resolution to 1920x1080 on an ATI RADEON 9700 PRO when connected to a specific monitor no longer results in the image not being display
The file version and the product version information is now correct
Worms 3D no longer fails to properly play. Launching in game movies no longer results in only the sound being heard with the display being corrupted or black
Intermittent texture corruption and flashing is no longer seen when playing the game Battlefield 1942
The shadow of the characters in the game Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow are now being displayed properly
Display corruption is no longer noticed when switching between 2D and 3D modes in the game Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004
The performance of the game Tomb Raider AOD is no longer compromised when running the game at the display resolution of 1600x1200
The brightness option found in certain games is now working properly when extended desktop is enabled and both monitors are set to 1280x1024 32bpp
Configuring the game RACER version 0.50 to run at full screen, 1600x1200 32bpp, no longer results in the game failing to respond
Setting the display resolution to 1600x1200 and running the game Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy no longer results in display corruption being noticed at a specific point in the game
Display corruption is no longer seen when playing the demo version of the game Far Cry
http://www.ati.com
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This is what puts me off ATI cards.
(runs for the hills)
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/*nukes hills*/
no peace for the blasfeamer
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I always want to write to both ATI & Creative and tell them that, had they done a decent job in the first place, they wouldn't need to update drivers every 3 months ;)
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Well, to be fair, it's still a lot better than pre-catalyst drivers...
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Better than nVidia.
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This is certainly true, but for all these companies it seems to me that most drivers are merely to fix the bugs/dodgy optimising the last drivers caused :(
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NVidia Makes better drivers!!! (or at least they make more!)
I'm using the 60.72 drivers, and they didn't even come with a readme! They work perfectly!
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Well, historically nvidia has made better drivers in terms of less bugs.
Unfortunately, in the recent times (because of the GFFX) nvidia's driver have had a lot of cheats in them to make the GFFX look faster.
The absolute latest drivers do fix most of these cheats but the stigma of having cheated and not admitting it still falls on them.
It also doesn't help that you still can't choose true trilinear filtering.
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I had nothing but grief with my old Ti4200 - frequent lockups and graphical corruption. But my 9800PRO seems to work perfectly apart from in Deus Ex 2. I wonder if they've fixed that yet....
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Eh, I'm running a ti4200 and have had zero problems with it. The GF4 harks back to the days when nvidia had good drivers.
They've probably fixed the Deus Ex 2 bug in some Catalyst driver set, you just have to find the right one -.-
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I don't see a problem with ATI's drivers other than the fact that support for older chips absolutely blows. *wonders when new Linux drivers come out*
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An interesting little tidbit. (Not to say that one makes drivers better than the other, but just an example).
Just scroll down a bit and look at the comparison pics:
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjA0LDM=
Cheers!
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thats nothing u should see my rig...
400 Celeron w/512SDRAM
Raedon 7500 64DDR-RAM
and i run freelancer, freespace 2 SCP, c&c generals, etc. with little or nolag.
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You're doing real well then.
Are 8X AGP cards backward compatible to 4x?
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Yes. But not all 8x cards are compatible with 2x slots though.
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How can I tell? That article's got me looking hard at the FX5900
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Interesting article... Still leaves me undecided on what future card to get, though.
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RandomTiger: some of those "bugs" are duplicates of each other, all software has bugs, period - even drivers.
If you think nVidia's drivers don't have bugs i'm going to laugh at you - they have MORE bugs they just don't admit they're there
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Couldn't that be said about any company, though?
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j3vr6: that they don't want to admit they have bugs? absolutely not - some companies like ATI are willing to admit bugs are present and fix them [promptly
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Problem, is, you don't know what they aren't telling you. You're basing your argument on the premise that people actually do what they claim they do.
I'm just debating, here, so don't think I'm just being argumentative. I was aiming for a 9800 when I read somewhere here that they're coming out with their next generation cards anyway, so I might as well wait.
What that article showed me is that all graphic cards are basically different and if you get only one you'll always have to sacrifice something.
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Well you know... every time a new game comes along a new problem arises, so they have to fix something for THAT, and then another problem and something for THAT, and then THAT and THAT, and then oh, this software crashes, so we gotta fix THAT, and its just one big download fest. Of course, the strain it puts on my 56K modem is great, so Im stuck downloading one thing at a time in a period of abot half an hour to an hour.
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@Kazan
Oh there's plenty of bugs in the nvidia drivers. However, generally, you don't have to swap drivers to get certain games to work.
That is, the bugs seem to be of a different type (broken HQ AF mode, broken Texture Sharpen, broken image quality).
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ChronoReverse: if you think having games not getting along with certain driver revisions is purely an ATI thing then you're grossly mistaken
yes there are _three_ bugs there btw.. maybe four i would need to look again
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Oh I'm perfectly aware that some driver versions of nvidia's break games. However, it still remains that the ATi ones tends to break another game when they fix one.
They almost got everything working with the 3.x drivers.
Then they released the 4.x drivers and it all began again.
And come on, I know perfectly well that nvidia cheats and lies to the consumers. They still generally have somewhat better drivers if (and a big if) you don't take into account the cheats.
Too bad they do cheat (albeit they've removed most of them in the newest drivers).
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You know that's often the game authors fault
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You could say the same about nvidia drivers breaking games (not counting the cheats), but it doesn't matter since there *exists* a driver set that can run the game perfectly.
Who knows, maybe the catalyst drivers for the X800's will have this ironed out.
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Why can't a set standard be made that the graphic card manufacturers can use?
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There is, it's called the Reference Driver. When you DL a driver directly from Nvidia or ATI that's what you get. The VC manufacturers are unreliable at best and often lag two, perhaps three version behind. It's also hard to get drivers from them when they seem to have forgotten that they ever made your specific card.
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We ARE talking about the reference drivers (who uses the drivers that come with the card) and these are the drivers with bugs galore.
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Can anyone name a product that, at some point, hasn't needed in any way shape or form an update of any kind? In this case I dont mean one out of an assortment of products, im talking about on particular form of product in general.
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there is a standard - it's called VESA, the current revision is 3.0 and supports up to 1024x768x32bpp - but no hardware accelerated openGL or directX
current microsoft infact ignores VESA beyond <1.X support - hence why you get 640x480x8bpp when it cannot find the driver - but you can use the generic VESA3 reference driver on linux and get 1024x768x32bpp easily -- VESA 3 also supports higher resolutions but they're not required to be supported by the card for it to be VESA3 compliant
Card manufacturers need to make up VESA4 specs that allow for the OpenGL and DirectX interfaces tot he card to use a generic instruction interface
then M$ needs to stop ignoring VESA
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Whats the problem with a driver update? If people need it they get it. Personally I'm on Catalyst 4.1 which are absolutely splendid drivers with no problems at all, no inconsistencies, no performance problems, and nothing I can complain about at all...so wheres the BS about ATI not making good drivers? Sure there are some lemons and some that aren't as good as others but with an update schedule like theirs there are bound to be a grouping of really good driers. The 3.4, 3.7. and 4.1 are all excellent examples of some of their best drivers and feature sets.