9800, which are the best drivers to use?

[RuBiQ]

Heard many diff storys about the best ones from various sources!

Which drivers do you guys use?

It is a Radeon 9800pro 128mb jobby!!

[koenshaku]

The only sets of Catalyst drivers worth running IMO are the 4.3's, which I currently have on my system and/or the 3.10's.

The 3.10's are uberstable and the 4.3's are enhanced in the pixel/vertex department, and are also pretty stable too.

Come to think of it I've never really had a problem with any set of Catalysts.

[Sam Cory]

Catalyst 4.4 drivers are quite good, I found drivers 3.8-4.2 actually
very buggy with stuttering in games and frame rate losses of upto
100fps at points.

[Spatial]

I haven't tried the 4.4's yet but I've heared people say there's a slightly backward step in terms of performance



Apparently all games ( except Call of Duty ) experience slightly low FPS, but the drivers are very stable.

Personally I'm sticking with the 4.3's for a while. I can't be arsed with upgrading every month just for the sake of it

If it ain't broke, don't fix it

[Ish]

I was using the 3.10s up until the 4.3s which I now use.

I've found them to be stable (had no problems at all). I switched to them mainly for the previously mentioned pixel/vertex shader performance improvements: for Far Cry.

[demon9k]

I upgrade the drivers ever time a new set come out. Can't say I have seen any difference in any games framerate or the amount of times my computer has crashed. The only difference I notice are direct fixes, where a game just wouldn't work at all before the upgrade.

[RuBiQ]

been recommended the 3.8 dets and farcry is running a treat on them atm!!

[Sam Cory]

Well whatever you do don't trust common opinions etc, they're nearly always wrong
when it comes to real performance, by that I mean fluidity and not just numbers,
I can achieve upwards of 400fps in some games with certain drivers but the
fuildity of movement and other incosistencies offset the fps which is rarely
accounted in the fps figure.

I recommend spending a few hours at a weekend perhaps trying Catalyst 2.7 and
upward, the 3DMark2001 Dragothic High Detail test is a reasonable representation
I find, though DX8, it still does reflect performance relevantly.

When I get really sick of poor frame rates in the latest games which haven't
been patched up properly to work well, I find quite old drivers, namely 3.2
give fluid performance consistently with my hardware, though they are quite
buggy.

I'm surprised so many found 4.3 good, I found them the most periodically
jittery drivers since 3.9, but then no 2 cards are the same I guess.

On the point of drivers, I'd just add for Nvidia owners, the 30.82 driver I found
the best performing on my Geforce cards, fluidity wise.

I don't like stuttering lol. Ashame it isn't relflect-able in benchmarking.

Take it easy.

[Pirotic]

with a 9800 pro i'd just use the latest drivers, it'll run like a dream on any game for now - so i dont see the point in lowering compatability or functions just for a few extra frames per second.

the 4.4 drivers are a little faster for me than the 4.3 (especially in Unreal Tournament 2004)

[fifty?ballz]

If you just want drivers that fully support Direct X 9 then
Catalyst 3.6 should do the trick.

There are also optimizations you can do to improve performance
and graphics quality with Radeons, though they are hard to find
you can search the net for one of the quality tweaks like

Colorfill=1
TextureMicroTiling=1
DitherAlpha=1

Alot of the tweaks are hardcore to say the very least and very time
consuming, sometimes they work, sometimes they require reinstalling
drivers.

**Also if you get problems in games, *disabling fast writes* solves lots
of problems and I've heard it doesn't reduce performance. Done
via ATI SmartStart.

[Concept]

I also own a 9800 and attempted to download the latest drivers, experiencing trouble downloading catalyst 4.4, and indeed any other ATI drivers I tried... I received this message:

IKernal.exe - Application Error

The instruction at "Ox771c76cb" referenced memory at "0x00163dd8". The memory could not be "read".

Click on OK to terminate the program.

Although I didn't automatically click ok and it continued downloading, notifying me that everything had finished and to restart the computer. When I did this and tried Far Cry, I definately noticed an improvement in performance, so I'm assuming Catalyst must have installed in some regard. Any ideas as to what caused the error message and if it may have prevented certain aspects of Catalyst installing? I've downloaded the program (4.4) a couple of times and re-installed it from set up, but I get the same message.

Any suggestions for those who may feel they know something? I'd appreciate it.

As you can probably tell, I'm returning to PC gaming after a long hiatus, so I'm not sure if there's supposed to be a Catalyst program on the desktop after installation. All I noticed after restarting the computer was the setup installation I'd initally downloaded... When catalyst usually downloads does it function as a separate program, or is it just essentially a set of background drivers?

[Fragmaster]

I don't use Catalyst drivers, I use the custom Omega drivers which have better visual quality.

Here is a link

http://www.omegacorner.com/