ATI Catalyst™ 8.12 Display Drivers officially out

No Crossfire issues here, games run really smooth aswell.

install went painless and easy.

this with two 4870x2 Gigabyte cards

 

Still can't force AA. This is pretty gay. I never should have went with ATI.

 

Ok..... I do know what I am talking about as I have used driversweeper in the past for my current card and has similar problems that some guys here are having. After uninstalling my drivers and using sweeper for some reason the OS struggled to re-install the new drivers and threw up errors. It was a right pain in the ass to get the drivers to install again. I used it a lot when I had a 8800GT and never had any problems so I think it just affects ATI owners.

This is a quote from FNF the driversweeper programmer on this very forum. Don't that just fill ya full of confidence.

The ATI drivers are designed to uninstall and install drivers in one click. The install manager takes care of everything without having to do all the uninstalling and sweeping malarky. I trust the driver authors over a third party any day. I have updated drivers this way for the last 5-6 times with no issues what so ever. All done in one reboot and all of my settings left intact.

 

Best ATI Driver for me....i have clean the system with driversweeper in safemode from RC3......Vista 64 SP1

only Fallout 3 has some stuttering effect like older driver....

 

Thats not BS if you read trough the posts most people end up with more trouble then all thse driver cleaning programs try to fix. ATi delte's everything just fine if you uninstall it like you should. The cleaning programs are made for people who are incapable of handeling a normal install/uninstall procedure. The problem with the reg cleaning programms is that they most of the time also delete Registry settings and thats a real bad thing to do.

 

Makes me wonder if anybody should use this programm as there are only a max of 12/15 keys to monitor / change / delete does this guy really know what he's doing? No wonder so much people here run into problems with cleaning their system/drivers.

 

I have yet to have a problem uninstalling/installing or installing right over top.

 

That's what is really strange about this whole topic. Some folks have no issues installing 'over the top' others have a clean install doing the old 'Drive Sweeper' thing. For me all my issues were when I used Drive Sweeper! How odd is all this?

 

Every users has a different number of programs and drivers installed, there is bound to be some computers that have problems and others that have none.

 

might have something to do with all the different hardware cofigurations, they can only get it right for some setups but not all.

 

I got a Zero Display Device Error or something like that... ???

 

Psychlone is advocating not using Drivesweeper on another thread. I don't think I will be using it again, well for ATI drivers anyway.

 

Just got my i7 rig built tonight..... Xfire seems to be working well for me so far. Will test more tomorrow.

 

Its difficult to say whether of not DriverSweeper is affecting owners of certain combinations of Chipset drivers, OS's and Video drivers or not. It certainly give me problems. I had the issue where 1 GPU would show as not installed in device manager. The only way I found to correct it was to:

Install latest version of CCleaner

(Important!)Go into device manager and manually uninstall the GPU entry that was showing as correctly installed by right clicking on it and selecting uninstall, making sure select the tickbox which says to delete driver software as well. Then go to the GPU entry with the exclamation mark and uninstall that too.

DO NOT REBOOT.

Go to add remove programs and express uninstall all ATI software.
Delete C:Ati folder

REBOOT

Allow windows to install its standard VGA drivers

Run CCLeaner and select reg scan on the left. Select scan for errors and then select fix all issues making sure you backup a copy of the registry. When complete repeat this process just in case it missed anything. Fix any further errors it finds.

REBOOT

Run driver install as normal with your fingers crossed. Vista owners if its OK after doing this try installing your next few driver updates by just running the installer and without uninstalling first. ATI's installer will uninstall the old drivers automatically before installing the new ones and keep your settings too.

 

Driversweeper causes updated drivers not to detect my hardware, drivercleaner works best for me.

 

I use Acronis Home Image to take a working backup of my system before installing important software such as display drivers so I have managed to revert my system back. I have tried all combinations of cleaning drivers, safe mode booting and installing over the top of old drivers and each time the results are the same; one GPU disabled. Installing the RC3 8.12 drivers works a treat though and crossfire works and I have the option to turn on or off the crossfire logo using right click on CCC. I am shocked by how easily some members will berate and mock others simply because these drivers don't work on certain systems. I thought we were here to help each other and to share our experiences!

One final test, I have backups of a straight Vista x64 SP1 install and XP Pro SP3 both with the latest updates applied (within the last 7 days). The new 8.12 drivers work for me in XP but NOT in Vista so I suspect that it IS a Vista x64 issue possibly relating to chipsets and driver revisions. I have checked with Asus and I have the latest drivers installed for my motherboard. In any event I have a system that is working albeit with the RC3 revisions and I can patiently wait until the problems are resolved. At the end of the day it's just a PC

 

Well I've now installed the display drivers *only* (since the Catalyst Control Center itself appears to be the same as the one with the betas, at least according to the Catalyst Install Manager it is) for both XP SP3 and Vista SP2 beta (dual-booting). Installed both of them over the existing beta drivers too with no issues although I did see a message about the drivers testing my system for stability upon rebooting with XP, something I've not come across with the earlier drivers. Also it's neat that you can install new drivers in Vista without the need for a reboot... I was impressed with that.

Although I've not tested them thoroughly in Vista yet, I did go ahead and install Crysis along with the v1.20 patch and played it for almost three hours at 1680x1050 with 2X AA on High settings for everything. I encountered no problems and only the odd instance of bad slowdown but considering my specs that is to be expected. I could even Alt-Tab from the desktop and back where I noticed that game uses 700 to 1,000 MB of memory... wooh! I was kind of shocked when I ran Fraps and discovered that the framerate was between 15 and 25 fps though... it plays buttery smooth 99.9% of the time too... very impressive really, it was always perfectly playable. I even played it with the wireless Xbox 360 controller too and loved every second of it... I bet the Xbox 360 would love to be able to run *that* game!!!

Not tried Far Cry 2 yet but according to the release notes that should see an improvement on the HD 38xx cards too with AA and I've been playing it at 1680x1050 with 2X AA and High settings but I've been getting crashes back to the desktop or VPU recoveries where the screen went black before returning me to the game. Love that about the ATI drivers in XP... with the NVIDIA cards that would have resulted in the game crashing or a BSOD for sure. I'm hoping that these drivers make the game run more stable... I'll test it later.

Need to try Fallout 3 too... I was having problems getting 4X AA to display properly with that game as it would work for so long but then entering a building or waiting seemed to disable it. 2X AA *did* work but it caused the game to stutter more when turning, which is odd considering that 4X AA - which was *definitely* on - worked better! :?

No optimisations for GTA IV though is disappointing but I guess I'd be struggling to run that game on High settings on my setup anyway. I'll pick that game up when I get my new PC sometime in the next few weeks hopefully.