Ati 8.3 out

Exatly m8, the last official AGP based ATi product was the X1950GT & Pro, if I remember it correctly. Since then manufacturers walk the on paths with bridged RV6xx based cards.

 

Exactly correct!, of course they don't even bother posting in their own forums to give an explanation of why they cannot support their AGP cards.
If they at least had the decency to warn people that they would not be supporting an unofficial product then that wouldn't be so bad.
The complete lack of any official ATI answer tells me that they are a company I do not want to buy anything from.

There is no way I am going to buy a card that is not officially supported by the Chipmaker, as when Powercolor, His, Gecube, Club3d, and Sapphire stop making these then there will almost certainly be no more 3rd party drivers coming out.

Looks as though Omega is either taking a break or has quit after the 7.12's, maybe someone else here knows more about that than me.
As he does such a stellar job supporting their unsupported products, then maybe AMD/ATI could slip Him a few $$$$$ to sort this.
You wonder if ATI even are aware of Omega?????

 

But if ATI has really paid the Omega Drivers Developers some amount of money (what i just can´t believe) to stop support their AGP cards or something they would hit themselves in the back. Many people who considered to buy an powerful ATI AGP card like the 2600XT or the HD3850 are just scared off by the lack of driver support and don´t buy such a card.

And many of them just don´t have the cash to swap to PCI-E and stay with their older AGP card like X850, X1650 or xX1950. In that case ATI is cutting his own arms and legs with this strategy cause they prevent people from buying cards with their own chipsets.

PCI-E at every price, no matter how many people are pissed off and left out. That´s ATI´s strategy :biggun:

 

It does sound like they are pushing all owners of older systems or older technologies to upgrade. Seems to me that it's kind of a dirty trick but AGP is officially over the hill it had a great run though. We might eventually see a new version in the future kinda like the PCI went to PCIE the ATA went to SATA.
But the issue regarding third party manufacters selling these cards knowing ATi won't support them. I would think they are the ones who should be legally held accountable for drivers and support since they released these revisions without ATI's consent. I think they should be taken to court and ordered to either support the products they release or offer full refunds.

 

A few months ago i wanted to update my old AGP system with a HD2600 Pro card. Now i had to find out that this was a bad decision. No good driver after all this time.
So the only choice i have now is to buy a complete new rig. That sucks.
And i wasted money on that card.

 

Oh but I have been! and thats with PCI-E. I have had a ticket open with ATI for 5 - 6 months now, with Crossfire screen corruption.

Which was fixed with 7.12, but sadly I had to move over to VGA. As I have two machines hooked up to the Dell 24"
And now I have corruption again, through VGA. So looks like I'll have to open another ticket. As the same patterns that was happening over DVI (which is fixed) is now happening through VGA.
I'll have to try 8.3 first though, but knowing my luck I doubt it'll make a difference.

This is another reason I've given up PC gaming, sick of drivers getting broken with a game that once worked fine before. Or waiting month after month after month after month and still no fixes.

 

Very good drivers, Crysis got a great boost and the new image scaling technique allows for gaming at lower resolutions, this is especially good for us who play older games as well which do not have widescreen support.

 

^ what do you mean by great boost?.....1 to 2 FPS...LOL

 

Well atleast 5 fps plus and I can have everything at high @ 1680x1050 excluding shaders since I dislike HDR (blurs the graphics).

This is with XP 64bit and of course DX9.

 

For me the crysis test shows better average fps, as does other games (oblivion) yet 3dMark 06 score down by 6000 points. Strange drivers.

I'll keep these, yet i suspect I am dropping to 1 gpu in low power (css stress test for example, in game css 300 np)

 

5 fps ...quite good....

 

I don't how much exactly.. I installed the drivers without expecting any improvements at all.

 

actually i play assasin creed on x1950pro agp ha! beat u all

 

im sure theres someway or hack to overcome pcie only as i think thats bs:bang:

 

what your ingame settings?

 

Well, at least FSAA in UE3.0 engine games looks nice. BioShock was quiet playable (though i wouldn't play entire game like this) on my system using 4xFSAA(+TAA), Quality Adaptive FSAA and 16xAF HQ (and everything set to High in game).

 

Can't get this damn CCC to work.

Just doesn't seem to install the control center.

 

Just got back my MSI 3870 X2 so I'm running CFX mode right now. One game I've seen improvement on is UT3. With my Q6600 at just a smidge past 3ghz and a single X2, I max out framerate at 170fps (perhaps 180fps) @1920x1200, max detail, SP Team DM with 6 bots. At the same setting and running CFX, I get well past 200fps....yes, FR do go down to >100fps but can go as high as 280fps. I hope all U3 engine based games show such improvement. BTW, uninstalling and reinstalling the driver suite went w/o a hitch.....awesome work by the ATi driver team.

 

I tried the xp version of these drivers and had nothing but problems so went back to 8.2s but running them on Vista is where they seem to excel. Running the q6600 @ 3.6 and 3870x2 at stock in xp i get 18287 in Vista with the 8.3 i managed 17995 so not as much difference as i thought, has to be the 8.3 in Vista workin it over the 8.2 in xp imo. Isn't it normally around 1k difference between xp and Vista?

 

Comparing more or less the same scene with Bioshock @1920x1200, max detail, DX10 - single HD 3870 X2


Exact ingame setting as above, 2x HD 3870 X2 in CFX mode