Ati Catalyst 7.1 for Vista OUT NOW!

By edgarf28
in Back Page News

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Grand Master

theyarecomingforyou

Posted
Posted

Wow, 90MB for the international version and that's just the 32bit version! Well, Vista and my new hard-drive don't arrive until Friday so I guess I've got a bit of a wait, though I'll grab these now to save time later. Now if only the drivers for my soundcard were released I would be sorted.

Mentor

Neonix1

Posted
Posted

FiringSquad has put up a quick review of these drivers here: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/window...d_catalyst_7.1/

As you can see, the Radeon X1950 XTX actually recorded a performance improvement under Vista, at 1280x1024 the margin is 15%

Looks like a very nice first Vista driver release, although AMD/ATi's OpenGL driver still needs work done apparently.

Rising Star

nautiqueskier

Posted
Posted (edited)

Ok, heres a quick review of these drivers

First of all, DirectX rendering is definitely improved. NFS Carbon runs almost as well on my ATI x1600 as my Nvidia 7800GT (with 97.46 Nvidia drivers, haven't tried Carbon on 100.54 but I'm sure it would run faster)

On the OpenGL side, I can't really compare it to previous drivers (cause OpenGL wasn't present) but I'll say that it runs, but slow... really slow, and it looks like crap (its still many times faster than previous ATI Vista drivers). For the first ATI driver with OpenGL though, I'll give them credit, its pretty stable.

The Catalyst Control Center seems largely functional (unlike Nvidias crumbling control system)

Edited by Ames
Proficient

XPGoD

Posted
Posted

What I'm about to write may sound silly... but I will test these drivers to see if they have the same effect.

This whole weekend, after installing my copy of Vista Business... I installed some games.

Battlefield 2

F.E.A.R. Combat

America's Army

Quite a difference between them, so I boot up my box using the latest Beta Catalyst's. Boot into America's Army.. and my cursor gives me the first indication to the lag I'm about to see.... oh no.

I boot online to SF Hospital and I see this general freaking out on the graphics.. but it's not framerate oriented.

So I shutdown the game and boot into my BIOS and lowered the AGP Aperature Size to 64Mb. Rebooted back into Vista, and went into the Catalyst software and set EVERYTHING to HIGH QUALITY.

Results?

Flies like a dream... BF2 can now be played at 1280x1024 HIGH settings, as with FEAR... FEAR acts like it's on crack... and I played last night with a 59-16 score of 228... WOOT

System:

AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Barton @ 2.315GHz

1GB PC2300 CAS 2.0 RAM

Radeon X700 Pro 256MB AGP 8x

Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic (comeon Creative where are those Vista drivers?)

2x 120GB Maxtor's

I know the system ain't much, but when you work as much as I do, you tend to spend more time on other people's machines than your own.

XPGoD

Neowinian

SethB

Posted
Posted

Sadly, Aero still crashes on my X800 GT. Vista starts with aero running, but the first time you launch an app (even notepad) it crashes and logs this:

The Desktop Window Manager has encountered a fatal error (0x88980406)

Then the display reverts to non-Aero mode.

I'm not alone in having this, as I've found numerous posts by other users, and a colleague at another University has the exact same issue. The only fix I've found is to use drivers from Vista RC-1. I've wiped my machine numerous times, installing only Vista and the graphics driver, in both Vista 32 and 64 bit flavors, and the problem still happens.

How do these things get WHQL certified again? Aren't they tested?

Mentor

DJLunacy

Posted
Posted
Sadly, Aero still crashes on my X800 GT. Vista starts with aero running, but the first time you launch an app (even notepad) it crashes and logs this:

The Desktop Window Manager has encountered a fatal error (0x88980406)

Then the display reverts to non-Aero mode.

I'm not alone in having this, as I've found numerous posts by other users, and a colleague at another University has the exact same issue. The only fix I've found is to use drivers from Vista RC-1. I've wiped my machine numerous times, installing only Vista and the graphics driver, in both Vista 32 and 64 bit flavors, and the problem still happens.

How do these things get WHQL certified again? Aren't they tested?

I have no problems with my AIW X800 except for the tv functions not working yet.

Rookie

Guillaume.Lafrance

Posted
Posted (edited)

This is weird, the installer only lets me install the Control Center and not the drivers. Anyone else getting this? Am I doing something wrong?

post-69682-1170117622_thumb.png

And the Control Center isn't much use, it seems.

post-69682-1170118888_thumb.png

Edited by Guillaume.Lafrance
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