Which ATi Drivers do you use?

[equk]

I've not really had any ATi cards until this system (X1900XT) so I don't know that much about the drivers, other than they seem a bit crap compared to my old nvidia drivers

When I first installed windows I used the OMEGA drivers with ATITool. I really got fed up with ATITool taking an age to startup and using my resources, so I thought I'd try the Catalyst ones (7.1). I put the driver only on without the control center and it seemed ok. As soon as I put the Catalyst Control Center on I started noticing loads of problems and also changes in the picture quality etc .

I also noticed a bug where whenever I ran cs:source, suddenly specular lighting was enabled, despite having it disabled in my config it seemed as if the CCC was enabling it for some reason. I found a option which seemed to fix the specular problem and also finally got the image quality back, but now certain aspects don't work. Mainly looking on the fps test thing on cs:s.

So I'm thinking of maybe putting the OMEGA drivers back on without ATITool or should I put the catalyst driver only on (no CCC crap) ??

Be interesting to see what the rest of you use and why etc

 

[PP Mguire]

I use 7.1 with the control center. No problems here. Recently though ive been messing with my 7950GT and Nvidia has better drivers still.

EDIT: The X1900XT and XTX are tanks though. So i would figure out the CCC to get your quality back.

 

[equk]

I use 7.1 with the control center. No problems here. Recently though ive been messing with my 7950GT and Nvidia has better drivers still.

EDIT: The X1900XT and XTX are tanks though. So i would figure out the CCC to get your quality back.

yer

I got the quality back, only to lose some directx features I think I might put the OMEGA drivers on as I had no problems with them and I think they should work without ATITool, altho ATITool is packaged with them.

I really don't like the way a service tells the card to speedup when a game starts, or the fact there are about 6 different executables all doing different things aswell as it being based on .NET framework

 

[PP Mguire]

Yea, i get around that by disabling CLI.EXE and the ATI2GAGS.EXE or w/e it is. Then you dont have like 12 processes (exageration) going on in the background from ATI. Also, you dont have CCC in the background telling what your games to do and for extra caution you can set all the stuff in it to application controled.

 

[Ham]

When i had an X1600 i used the omegas. gave a slight performance boost and no hassle at all.

 

[mrapoc]

I used omegas on my nvidia 6600gt back in the day but I found sometimes textures lacked their proper colour and texture with little/no performance boost, so now i just use the ati ones - hate the CCC as it stands tho

 

[FarFarAway]

I use CCC, not had a lot of problems

 

[equk]

I've just uninstalled the ATi drivers and installed the OMEGA tweaked ones, but cs:source still keeps enabling specular lighting also textures are corrupt until I exec my autoexec or disable specular lighting again.

I think the CCC has set something in the registry which the uninstaller doesn't remove

I think I might have a look for a ATi driver cleaner

Screenshot of dust2 with corruption + shiney specular (resized to 800x640)

 

[mrapoc]

I haad that once, i fixed it by changing a config command. mp_decal springs to mind but im not sure (had to turn something off)

 

[equk]

I haad that once, i fixed it by changing a config command. mp_decal springs to mind but im not sure (had to turn something off)

mp_decals is set to 200 on my cfg (doesn't it set the num of bullet holes etc?)

The command it seems to change is mat_specular which causes problems because mat_bitmap is disabled. But I just cant understand why the drivers seem to be changing mat_specular when I have it set to 0 in my autoexec. I also tried adding it to my config.cfg and making it read only but it still does the same

 

[mrapoc]

All i know is that i changed a command, coz everything was extremely shiny and glass like

 

[equk]

I think I might have found out what was causing the problem.

I removed the CCC drivers and installed the latest OMEGA ones which were exactly the same, the textures looked rubbish and it kept forcing specular lighting on cs:s. Since installing CCC+removing it I had loads of random crashes on cs:s aswell, mostly runtime errors

I tried everything to fix it, re-installed directx, re-installed .NET runtime, re-installed chipset drivers, re-installed OMEGA drivers. I removed the ati display instances in the registry. But it made no difference.

I've now re-installed windows and used the OMEGA's I used originally (3.8.273) and now cs:s looks amazing in comparison to the others aswell as not forcing specular lighting.

 

[blade]

Omega drivers!

I use the 7.1 drivers with my x1950 pro. Works great.

 

[NickS]

I don't use CCC.. just the cat's.