The new ATI video Drivers.

[Balemur]

STAY AWAY! I DLed the new ati drivers about 3 days ago and since then TF2 keeps crashing after about 15 minutes and other games crash after about 1-2 hours of playing. Sucks too cause I was just playing PL_goldrush against the stack and had 60+ and 4 doms after about 10 minutes. Then bam crash. Also I've had horrible lag spikes with this new driver.

Anyways, just a warning for the rest of you that may be using ATI video cards. Although you may get a 15-20% increase in FPS this patch it's not very stable at all.

Edit: Also want to know if anybody else is having these problems?

Edit2: On an added note I'll give it one more chance before giving it total blame. Going to uninstall the drivers, use my reg cleaner, then reinstall a fresh copy of the video driver.

[MastahKillah]

Lol, I guess Nvidia was a good vid card choice this time xD

[SoBe Green]

I was trying to find the topic where a certain individual was telling me how ATi's drivers were the best because they were perfect. Hmm...

[Balemur]

Originally Posted by SoBe Green

I was trying to find the topic where a certain individual was telling me how ATi's drivers were the best because they were perfect. Hmm...

I never said they were perfect but I did say they were better than Nvidia. I originally listed this as a warning but found the fix for it. Uninstall old drivers, install new. Problem fixed now. Other forums are also saying this as the fix for this particular patch.

Anyways, I had several more issues with my nvidia card. Only my second RMA had crashes but seeing random artifacing crap on the screen is just as bad. I had tons of artifacing issues with my hella over-priced nvidia cards. My 7800GTX ($500) RMA'd to a 7900GTX ($550) RMA'd to finally a 7950GX2 ($600) video card. I'd rather have a few crashes with 2-3 days of problems than literally weeks to months of down time with added shipping costs for an already overpriced video card. =P I believe EACH shipping cost was another $30 and about 2-5 weeks of down time.

In the end it's all relative and fixable but to what extent and why do us end-users always have to bother with them? I used to uninstall/reinstall new drivers all the time but I guess I was too lazy and took for granted that the new drivers would install correctly on their own.

Lesson learned - NEVER take anything done on microsoft for granted. It will always screw up. On the other hand my video card drivers overwrote and worked perfectly on my Linux Fedora HDD. =P

[G2]

Vista or XP drivers?

[Balemur]

Originally Posted by G2

Vista or XP drivers?

Vista x64. XP isn't that much greater than Vista. Overall I still say Win2k is GREATLY better than XP and Vista ever has been or will. The only exception was all the little loop-holes you had to go through to get a Vista/XP proprietary software to run on it. Also the whole memory cap stinks on non-x64 systems. My 3 current HDDs run: Vista x64 Home Premium (Main drive), Windows XP x64 Pro (back-up), and Fedora 8 (Too lazy to update to 9).

Linux always wins the cake, pie preferred, but emulating windows for windows proprietary software/games is a real nuisance. I can guarentee a 20-60% increase in FPS and nearly 100% increase in stability using Linux over any windows OS I've used so far.

Something I find funny is how Windows first stole the look of Linux and now the new Windows 7 looks EXACTLY like my brother's Mac OS X.

[Sock]

Originally Posted by Balemur

Overall I still say Win2k is GREATLY better than XP and Vista ever has been or will.

What are you smoking and where can I get some? Maybe if you had said windows 98...but 2k? Come ON, it was absolute trash.

[G2]

Originally Posted by Sock

What are you smoking and where can I get some? Maybe if you had said windows 98...but 2k? Come ON, it was absolute trash.

Actually, I'm a big fan of Windows 2000, it was really stable and I used to have it as my primary gaming OS for years.

That said Balemur, you're running Vista 64bit, you should have known the drivers were going to suck the second you installed it. Welcome to running a niche version where the market share dictates that not many resources are going to be devoted. I didn't run 64bit for this exact reason. It's not the fault of MS either, its the fault of ATI.

Tested the Vista 32bit drivers this morning, they work perfectly.

[Balemur]

Originally Posted by Sock

What are you smoking and where can I get some? Maybe if you had said windows 98...but 2k? Come ON, it was absolute trash.

I was a long fan of Win98 but their limited memory capacity of 512MB made me move on. Win2k was EXTREMELY stable and safe. WinXP was a bigger failure than Vista. I guess people just don't remember it that well. First 2 years of WinXP (released 2001) - Easily hacked due to open ports that could not be blocked and if blocked your system would crash. Greater world-wide shame than Vista ever has received. The whole "OMFG I need a whole 512MB to run WinXP!?!?!? that's a gabillionzillion dollars!!! o_O" - Actually $100-150 back in 2001. As for drivers, they were at least 10 times worse back then and not as user friendly.

Pretty much any issue people have today with Vista you could trace back to the early days when XP came out. The difference, Vista upon release is and was more stable than XP and XP never did become considered "stable" until SP2 (2004). So 3 years later they finally have a stable working OS. Vista has been out for 1.5 years now and I've had no issues with it yet. Not ones I could ever officially blame Microsoft for anyways.

Originally Posted by G2

Actually, I'm a big fan of Windows 2000, it was really stable and I used to have it as my primary gaming OS for years.

That said Balemur, you're running Vista 64bit, you should have known the drivers were going to suck the second you installed it. Welcome to running a niche version where the market share dictates that not many resources are going to be devoted. I didn't run 64bit for this exact reason. It's not the fault of MS either, its the fault of ATI.

Tested the Vista 32bit drivers this morning, they work perfectly.

Further reading down the thread you would have noticed my 64bit drivers are working perfectly fine now. My overall fix was done by uninstalling all versions of the graphics drivers, running a registry cleaner, and reinstalling. No more crashes thus far but we'll see. Also the WinXP x64 ran pretty well. I had less issues with it vs. the WinXP x86 OS.

Edit: I think I bought WinXP Pro x64 for like $10-15 (Full retail) about 2-3 years ago.

[[HamsTeR]]

Originally Posted by Balemur

I never said they were perfect but I did say they were better than Nvidia. I originally listed this as a warning but found the fix for it. Uninstall old drivers, install new. Problem fixed now. Other forums are also saying this as the fix for this particular patch.

From what I understand, it is ALWAYS advisable to uninstall old gfx drivers before installing new ones. I read that the vast majority of instability issues are due to people not doing this.

[Balemur]

Originally Posted by [HamsTeR]

From what I understand, it is ALWAYS advisable to uninstall old gfx drivers before installing new ones. I read that the vast majority of instability issues are due to people not doing this.

Yeah, just a good habit I stopped doing for a good year or so. I've had such good luck installing drivers over old ones that I stopped going through that long process. Anyways, I'll be doing that long process again from now on.

Maybe they'll fix this by the year 3000.

[Sock]

Originally Posted by Balemur

I was a long fan of Win98 but their limited memory capacity of 512MB made me move on

Agree with the rest of your post, but 98 had a ram limit of 2 gigs. As far as stability goes I've ran XP on four different systems now, and only had to reformat one of those... Pretty decent considering I've ran XP since the beta days ( and yes I do remember how horrid xp was at first, it's just been fed MUCH better drivers from 3rd parties and a lot of fixes from MS since then). The new catalyst drivers are giving me poorer performance on my old box, will be rolling back.

[Heimdal]

$30 for shipping? what the fuck did you overnight it?

Try playing TF2 on linux so I can see how much you whine from the performance hit. What games are you going to play on Linux? Quake 3? What's the last major game that had any Linux support at all? You're complaining so much about windows but talking about having to emulate it so obviously you need it for something.

How did Windows steal the look of Linux? XP stole lots of things but not the look. They didn't steal anything from Linux they stole from FreeBSD, don't confuse trash with class. XP is 100x better for gaming than 2000 ever was and if you ever used Windows 98 for more than 2 seconds you'd release what a whopping piece of shit it was but still light years ahead of 95. I had a gig of ram on 98, it worked fine. Hell I don't even remember if I had to edit the registry to do it but either way it worked. And wow 150 bucks for 512 mb, I have a stick of ram with a $499 price tag still on it and it's a whopping 16 mb.

"Easily hacked due to open ports that could not be blocked and if blocked your system would crash."

Are you talking about the NetBIOS hacks? Yeah if you were a retard not running a firewall or dumb enough not to turn it off. It wasn't like the days of 95/98 where it took a couple malformed packets to blue screen someone.


I think what I'm getting at is: you're an idiot. Thanks.

[-Thief-]

omega drivers ftw

[Balemur]

Originally Posted by Sock

Agree with the rest of your post, but 98 had a ram limit of 2 gigs. As far as stability goes I've ran XP on four different systems now, and only had to reformat one of those... Pretty decent considering I've ran XP since the beta days ( and yes I do remember how horrid xp was at first, it's just been fed MUCH better drivers from 3rd parties and a lot of fixes from MS since then). The new catalyst drivers are giving me poorer performance on my old box, will be rolling back.

Win98 did have a limit of 2gigs but their current hardware limitations made it physically impossible to ever hit 2gigs with PC133 memory. I used to run a gig of PC133, and later 1.5gigs of PC2100, but less than 512 Megs was actually used. Win98 had way too many bugs related to memory. I still remember them having a 256MB limit that later was fixed through several windows updates.

Originally Posted by Heimdal

$30 for shipping? what the fuck did you overnight it?

Try playing TF2 on linux so I can see how much you whine from the performance hit. What games are you going to play on Linux? Quake 3? What's the last major game that had any Linux support at all? You're complaining so much about windows but talking about having to emulate it so obviously you need it for something.

Linux is by far more stable than Windows ever has or will be. Have you ever used Linux before? Everything runs more stable, smoother, and is utilized better than any microsoft OS can ever dream to. As for gaming, I leave that to the company that licenses them all, Microsoft. The only reason I ever use Windows, as I pointed out I have always used windows and even vista x64, is for gaming.

I never said anything about using Linux for gaming due to the fact that emulating shit is a waste of time and slows down the machine much more than just playing on Windows instead.

Originally Posted by Heimdal

How did Windows steal the look of Linux? XP stole lots of things but not the look. They didn't steal anything from Linux they stole from FreeBSD, don't confuse trash with class.

Yeah it was FreeBSD they stole from. 8 years is a long time and I had a simple slip-up. Don't have to be an ass about it. A simple correction would've been fine.

Linux isn't trash. If anyone considers Windows golden then something's seriously wrong with their thought process.

Originally Posted by Heimdal

XP is 100x better for gaming than 2000 ever was and if you ever used Windows 98 for more than 2 seconds you'd release what a whopping piece of shit it was but still light years ahead of 95. I had a gig of ram on 98, it worked fine. Hell I don't even remember if I had to edit the registry to do it but either way it worked.

First off, XP was just a glorified 2000. 2000 was more stable and always better than XP until its support ended in June 2005. Like vista vs. XP, everything XP could run, 2000 could run faster, smoother, and better all the while using less resources. Microsoft however later made "XP proprietary" in games and software making Win2k users either switch or use the work-around. The work-around required you to install XP proprietary software through "DOS". How XP gets better benchmarks than Vista, so did Win2k over XP. And how Vista runs proprietary Direct X 10 gaming, XP just ran proprietary gaming software ever since Age of Empires III (maybe before but this was my first game with an XP requirement).

Originally Posted by Heimdal

And wow 150 bucks for 512 mb, I have a stick of ram with a $499 price tag still on it and it's a whopping 16 mb.

Not sure why we're having an e-peen about cost of ram. o_O

"OMFG I need a whole 512MB to run WinXP!?!?!? that's a gabillionzillion dollars!!! o_O" - Actually $100-150 back in 2001." The point of me posting that was to show the attitudes of people with Vista today are the same as back when XP was released. Today people need to spend more money for new hardware as many did back when XP was released. I bet at least 90% of the people playing on our Voogru servers had that issue or were too young to remember.

Originally Posted by Heimdal

"Easily hacked due to open ports that could not be blocked and if blocked your system would crash."

Are you talking about the NetBIOS hacks? Yeah if you were a retard not running a firewall or dumb enough not to turn it off. It wasn't like the days of 95/98 where it took a couple malformed packets to blue screen someone.

Firewalls meant nothing on WinXP. I proved Raytheon this several times by showing easy ways of hacking in using free third-party programs easily DLed on download.com. I also used several Raytheon programs that easily hacked WinXP. Windows Vista is much more secure than WinXP ever has been.

Microsoft exec calls XP hack 'frightening' - CNET News.com

Originally Posted by Heimdal

I think what I'm getting at is: you're an idiot. Thanks.

Quoting a bit from Sock here, "What are you smoking and where can I get some?"

Insults are just another way of showing others how much of an asshole you truly are.

Originally Posted by -Thief-

omega drivers ftw

Unfortunately Omega drivers don't support Vista x64 still right?