Gloat and work stuff

[Hovis]

So for this feature I'm writing for work I've been kitted out with a Asus EAX 1800XT TOP graphics card. ATI fanboys amongst you are probably aware that it's the single fastest graphics card currentily available in the whole wide world. Damn the things I do for work. Still, it's a living.

Anyway this feature is all about busting myths, the folks in the office want to see if a fairly committed Nvidia user can be convinced of teh sechsyness of ATI cards, by tackling the commonly held belief that ATI cards have shitty drivers.

So if any of you have any horror stories about ATI drivers, or if you use an ATI graphics card currently and have any tips and tricks I might not know I'd love to hear them.

Between you and me I know this card is good, I reviewed it and it there was nearly sexwee involved, but I've never, ever let an ATI card loose in my own beloved system, and I'm scared. :eek:

[Echor]

I use ATI cards in some of my comps, no problems here whatsoever! (I also use nvidia in a couple)

I'm picky about how I install the drivers though, I just get the "display driver only" option and use ATT (ATI Tray Tools) to give me more options for tuning than the standard control panel, and also avoiding the CCC control panel that requires dot.net, that way I get fewer processes running and less memory loading :)

[Vasquez]

My ATI drivers made my PC stop feeding output to my monitor randomly.

[Echor]

My ATI drivers made my PC stop feeding output to my monitor randomly.I had that problem about a year ago, turned out to be a windows fault, not the driver, one key in the registry change later and it never happened again ([HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"LargePageMinimum"=dword:ffffffff)

That was after a format and install of a new card, drove me nuts, and to this day I still don't see why that specific key being wrong could actually have stopped the signal from my gfx card. (blank screen, monitor showing as being on standby, mid game)

[One Armed Scissor]

I like my ATi card. Stop being a fanboy and take a seat on the fence

[Fusion]

The only problem I can think of with my ATi card is occaisional compatiblity problems with some legacy games and the VPU crash in Searing Gorge and Blackwing Lair in WoW (the recover catches it, but I often end up looking at a blank screen for 30 seconds or so before it sorts itself out).

[Vasquez]

I like my ATi card. Stop being a fanboy and take a seat on the fence

By 'fence' do you mean 'cock'?

[Hovis]

Well it works. It hasn't done anything naughty to me and my screen if anything looks a little sharper. :confused:

For the record I think I like it better than my original card, but then this is a £500 graphics card with 512meg of RAM, so it's bound to rock a bit.

We'll see how really attached to it I am when it comes to be time to give it back. :cool:

[Nyana]

ATi card have problems showing the Throne Room in the Nefarius encounter as we found out last night. A few of our raidmembers had an ATi card and they kept locking up or disconnecting with their current drivers. But.. in the end we got Nefarius down, all that is left to conquer is AQ :D

[Volw]

I have a really nasty problem with my 9600XT and Abit KV-8 Pro ( VIA chipset). Had to disable AGP read/write, otherwise it's crashing after every couple of minutes.

[Derekian]

as was said..ATI cards have problems in Blackwing Lair (mostly from Ebonroc's room untill Nefarian's) and in some places in Searing Gorge where it doesn't crash but you get a nice 30 second black screen untill VPU recover does his work

[Ludicrouse]

Never ever had a single teeny weeny problem with my X800XT in ANY game.. or any "part" of a game.


Like Echor... i never bother with the ATi control Panel.

[Nyana]

Reminds me that my 9800pro with Omega drivers given me a headache in PS, the ground outside buildings was gone, whenever you step outside you fall into the void and die. Solution? Switch back to original drivers, never ever install Omega drivers again.

[Hovis]

You guys are scaring meh.

[Ludicrouse]

The thing is Hovis... After the X series was released ATi upped the quality of their driver support by a huge amount. I personally wouldnt touch any old driver or old card with a shitty stick.

But i can honestly say i have never had any problem with any games except maybe really old ones like UFO: Enemy Unknown and the like.


Going by what people think of/have had issues with the older cards isnt gonna get you a true idea of how things are with ATi now.

[Flufball]

Its not the ATi drivers that have put me off ATi, but the driver team themselves, it has kind of put me off ATi.

[Fusion]

You guys are scaring meh. The Omega drivers that Nyana was talking about are an unofficial 3rd party release. Apart fron the afformentioned problems with 2 areas in WoW, the ATi drivers seem no worse than Nvidia's (remember the problems with Half-Life/Counter-Strike about 3 years ago? that lasted months :P).

[Hovis]

Its not the ATi drivers that have put me off ATi, but the driver team themselves, it has kind of put me off ATi.

Several of the guys from work have met them and while they do not literally stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA" when confronted with issues they near as damnit it do.

That said though the most notable thing so far I've found is the sharpness and quality of the image. Fucking hell it's good. Word is that ATI use much better tech for converting DVI to D-Sub images, so on a TFT such as we use at work I'd never spot the difference but on my home PC which is a CRT the ATI is much better.

Don't expect this thread to be a Bread Becomes ATI Fanbwoi, or Bread Remains Nvidia Fanbwoi thread though. Bottom line is that this ATI card is the best card in the world and nobody, not even me, would dispute that (until a time soon, check NDA thread, check it in a week), and for the money it should be. It's just got fuckloads of pipelines, a frankly silly amount of RAM, clock speeds of 800 on the Core and 1.6 GHz on the RAM, Arctic Cooling, I mean it's just a damn dirty ape of a card.

I'm looking forward to finding where it falls down though, if it actually does. I'm using the latest drivers so I'm fairly confident that it'll be okay.

[Flufball]

Several of the guys from work have met them and while they do not literally stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA" when confronted with issues they near as damnit it do.

You said it not me :p

[Fusion]

From the Catalyst 6.1 release notes (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/Catalyst_61_release_notes.html):World of Warcraft: Rotating or zooming within the Blackwing Lair or Seering George level of the game no longer results in a VPR Recover occurring after approximately a few minutes of game play. Further details on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21265
Woot!

[Hovis]

Looks like BF2 isn't working. Will need to reinstall. Then reinstall again when it's time to change the guard. Bugger.