I have a sapphire x1950 pro 256mb pci which uses the 7.4 drivers that came with the card. I plan on playing bioshock soon so I need to up grade my drivers. I only want to use official drivers. What drivers are the best drivers to use. I am more interested in stability than getting an frame or two in the fps. From what I can tell though I am not sure the series 8 drivers are totally geared toward the newer cards.
The 8.1 or 8.2 were very decent sets for my old agp x1950pro. But you really must try the NGO 7.3's : / even though you dont want too.
Are they better than the Omega drivers? I'm using the Omega 8442 at the moment. Performance is really good but the AA isn't that good with them.
I have the same card/different brand and I get great results with the 8.4 drivers using ATI Tool. CCC gave a very noticable performance hit on my games but unfortunately it had to be installed to get the drivers then uninstalled to install ATI Tool. Trying to install drivers alone failed repeatedly. I run BF2/2142, GTR2, GT Legends, Race 07, all The Orange Box games, NFS Pro Street, & Frontlines: Fuel of War for example at 1680x1050 with 2 or 4x AA. It amazes me that I get that kind of performance and image quality from that card but it works! The only problem I've had is that DiRT won't work as it will not display it's menus without total distortion.
I have a 1900gt, and found the 8.14 drivers a success, stable and good, plus you get catalyst ai optimization/bugfixes for newer games. I'm playing assassins creed at 1024x768, 2xaa, 4 (high quality) AF, hdr on with shadows and plays smooth, merely a little drop when you see all the city from high points. Plus in opengl i noticed a lot less glitches/improved performance (unigine sanctuary benchmark)