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ATI drivers - myth or reality?

post #1 of 73
Thread Starter 
Getting ready to take my first plunge into AMD world. But a bit nervous about the number of driver issues posted. I understand that AMD drivers are not noob proof as NVIDIA ones, but how bad is it? How much of a technical competency is required to tweak them to work? It will be annoying to tweak them constantly, but tweaking them a few times to get them perfect is acceptable. Any software available that allows you to set drivers and/or cf profiles based on games without having to manually set?
Looking for some real AMD users to paint a true picture and also suggest some tweaking softwares. I do not plan to overclock my card/cards. Just as an FYI, planning to pull trigger on a 6870 and get another a few months later for cf.
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Wife's bane
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post #2 of 73
some people have problems others dont and ill be honest i think i had just as many problems with ATI drivers that i have had with my 470 drivers so dont think that its just ATI that can have problems
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post #3 of 73
as long as you have a newer card, you should be fine (driver wise). The Catalyst Control Center still blows though.

I have only had problems with older cards. They don't keep older cards up to date as well as nvidia does. I have a 1 year old laptop that can no longer play games since I upgraded to windows 7 -_- thanks ATI...
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post #4 of 73
Well as far as the drivers go, if your starting off with a fresh install I dont think you will have any problem at all. Just install Windows 7 then grab the the latest amd drivers and install. The latest amd drivers are meant to be installed over the old ones.

If your going from nvidia to amd, I dont think its that hard either. Simply run driversweeper before installing the card. Take out all graphics card drivers and install the card. Download the latest catalyst drivers then your good. Catalyst Control Center works pretty good for just regular tweaking (IMO thats all you need to tweak if your not going to be overclocking)
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post #5 of 73
Honestly the last time I had any noticeable problem with an ATI driver was waaaaay back in the days of Counter-Strike 1.5. The game would plainly crash upon startup and that was fixed with a subsequent Catalyst version. Since then I've owned almost nothing but ATI cards (except for a 7600GT I had for a year) and never had a problem.
post #6 of 73
CFX is terrible for ATI, other than that it is really just a matter of taste. I certainly will wait a while before I ever go back to CFX though...
post #7 of 73
I've had no problems with my 5970, apart from the fact that GTA IV runs like utter rubbish, but I assume thats down to crossfire. Some games have issues with it like Microstutter. I did have 2 5850's at one point and never got them to work, constant BSOD's.

Other than that, my experiences have been positive. I'd go with a single GPU setup though.
 
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post #8 of 73
i honestly never had any driver issues with ati. maybe im just lucky
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post #9 of 73
My the catalyst control center doesn't even shows up with my 4870X2 and I can't put the fan harder :S
The only drivers that have ever worked normal with my card are from the box.
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post #10 of 73
I love my card. No, I couldn't get 10.11 to work, but it's the only driver that actually didn't work.
     
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