Vista + ATI

fork4k

Member
Howdy gents, ladies, hornie ones, and murlocs,

I'm facing some interesting issues when it comes to using my ATI card in vista. I thought maybe I'd create a post to talk about how your experiences w/ ATI cards & vista are?

I've got a mobility radeon 9700 (Toshiba P30) & the only driver I got working (i.e. didn't cause the infamous code 43 error) were the ones that came for XP way back in the day when I purchased the laptop (6.14.1). I've tried using teh catalyst beta driver (released on nov 2nd), omega drivers, & the zero drivers but, alas, to no avail.

The obvious disadvantage to usign teh XP drivers is that they aren't compliant with WDDM...which means no fancy vista animations. Furthermore, I get BSOD (well...my screen goes blue...I don't get an actual dump) every time I run a game on DirectX / OpenGL. I thought maybe the former had to do with DX10; so, I installed DX9c...but, that didn't help either.

So, right now, I have XP drivers on Vista & an XP install for games :tongueout:. How have your experiences with ATI & Vista (w/e version) been? Anyone get them to work (do tell)?

Cheerio
K4
 
I don't think there are mobility radeon drivers out for Vista yet, that's probably the problem.
However, ATi's drivers in general are of very poor quality, and plain suck.
Although Vista is RTM, ATi's Vista drivers still don't have full optimizations nor do they have OpenGL support - a *huge* missing feature.

nVidia has always been better on the quality-drivers front... I have an ATi though, (no better price/performance ratio than the Radeon 9600 IMO) and we'll just have to wait for ATi to release RTM drivers at last.

Hopefully Omega will have Vista WDDM drivers too - but I wouldn't bet on it. Their custom ATi drivers totally own ATi's on XP.
 
I believe that's the same driver released for 5840 and while it is being rebranded as for use with Vista RTM, the driver itself isn't RTM.... Only at ATi errr.. AMD.
 
Hey Peter... What do you mean?
You can install the drivers either from the device manager and manually selecting the INF file for the driver, or by running the Catalyst installer.

What did you do?
 
I installed them using Catalyst installer...I maybe misread the posts...thought that there was a problem with them.
 
No, there's nothing wrong with the Catalyst installer. Just that, till now, ATi still hasn't released final and fully optimized drivers for Vista :frowning:
 
Hi

I installed Vista RTM yesterday.
I have a Radeon 9600 card.
The installer found a Microsoft Driver on the DVD for this card.
Only rated 2.2 on Vista performance check though.

Kevin
 
I have a Radeon and it should rate from 3.3 to 4.0 depending on the drivers.

Download the latest from ATi - they get higher ratings.

Welcome to NeoSmart Technologies btw, Kevin :sunglasses:
 
My graphics manage a measly 3.1. They stick to the lowest score...too bad, as everything else is in the upper 4's and 5's.
I have the latest from ATI/AMD.
 
Same card as you - 9550.
It get's a 3.1 at 9550 speeds, you have to flash it to a 9600, then you'll get a 4.0 - are you big on gaming?
 
Computer Guru said:
Same card as you - 9550.
It get's a 3.1 at 9550 speeds, you have to flash it to a 9600, then you'll get a 4.0 - are you big on gaming?
No i'm not. I play the odd game here and there, but very seldom. Not sure about "flashing" it...doesn't that put undue strain on it?
 
Hi

Have added the beta ati drivers for vista as linked above.
My performance rating for the graphics card increased from 2.0 to 3.7
My gaming rating however decreased from 3.2 to 3.0
No problem for me because I don't game much.

Have looked in Display Settings to set Hardware acceleration But this feature is disabled.
Nothing in dxdiag either.
How do you set this?

Also in the Catalyst page I cannot preview 3D effects. Is this possible?
Or is it not possible with beta drivers.

Kevin
 
Yeah, that's (yet another) known bug that ATi refuses to fix. Hang in there, we've spoken to ATi, and the final drivers are expected sometime in JANUARY!
 
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