Cat 7.6 released

[lyssword]

see title
http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html

 

[apoppin]

made STALKER playable for HD2900xt at 14x9 with everything maxed ... unplayable before at the same settings

 

[fern420]

arggg. cant enable crossfire on two 2900's for me. when i check the crossfire box i get a new popup window (must be new with these drivers) telling me i need to reboot to enable crossfire and when i let it reboot and go back into the CAT the crossfire box is unchecked again. if i check it again it tells me i need to reboot. its a never ending cycle and i cant enable crossfire. went back to the 7.5 drivers and it was just fine.

its the drivers too because i tried with the old cat but the new drivers and it still does it. it must have something to do with this new popup that reboots the pc when you enable crossfire.

 

[BFG10K]

Try this hotfix to fix Crossfire on 7.6.

 

[Bateluer]

Installing now.

 

[mruffin75]

Originally posted by: apoppin
made STALKER playable for HD2900xt at 14x9 with everything maxed ... unplayable before at the same settings

I wonder if it will make other titles faster as well.. as there's nothing explicitly said about Stalker performance in their release notes...

Haven't had a chance to check it out on my machine yet.. although not sure how much good that'll do...I need a CPU/Memory upgrade to catch up to the HD2900XT..

 

[LittleNemoNES]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Try this hotfix to fix Crossfire on 7.6.

nice find!

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: mruffin75

Originally posted by: apoppin
made STALKER playable for HD2900xt at 14x9 with everything maxed ... unplayable before at the same settings

I wonder if it will make other titles faster as well.. as there's nothing explicitly said about Stalker performance in their release notes...

Haven't had a chance to check it out on my machine yet.. although not sure how much good that'll do...I need a CPU/Memory upgrade to catch up to the HD2900XT..

stalker was UNplayable on my 2900xt rig with Cats 7.5 and STALKER ver 1.0001 ... to be fair, i also went to v1.0003 at the same time ... so i am not certain it was 'only' the new Cats ... however, the difference is like night and day from yesterday .. it appears [after a very short time with it this early-am before bed] to now be faster than my x1950p with every in-game setting completely maxed out ... and a much higher top FPS ... still bottoms at a playable 30 FPS

 

[Capt Caveman]

TweakTown's ATI Catalyst 7.6 performance analysis

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: Capt Caveman
TweakTown's ATI Catalyst 7.6 performance analysis

looks like everything got a performance boost - except AA/AF

AMD?s ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT continues to see performance increases and it is clear that this month the driver team had their eye on improving OpenGL performance, which is great considering Enemy Territory is just around the corner.

The bad news is though that there are still no changes to AA tests and this is something that is hurting the HD 2900 XT at the moment. It manages to look impressive when you compare it to the Nvidia cards in non-AA tests (and as far as price is concerned) but as soon as you start to crank up the settings like AA and AF, it can begin to slump.

With all that said not everyone is an AA person - I have personally never used it and if you are the same, it would probably make the HD 2900 XT the better option especially when you consider the price versus performance ratio.

Hopefully the driver team dives into the AA issue in future releases but as always check out the full release notes and if you didn?t upgrade last month to the Catalyst 7.5 drivers, with the increase in OpenGL performance here, we would suggest the upgrade this month with the 7.6 version!

 

[KeithTalent]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Try this hotfix to fix Crossfire on 7.6.

Good stuff! I saw the Crossfire warning in the notes, so avoided these Cats., but it looks like I should get them if I want to play Stalker.

KT

 

[nullpointerus]

The 7.6 release is completely unacceptable for me.

Instead of some Avivo quality options artifacting (as in 7.5 and earlier), all Avivo quality options bluescreen my computer with an infinite loop error preceded by slideshow framerates and massively distorted audio. I can't watch anything I've recorded in Vista Media Center.

There's no point in my testing 3D performance with these because I can't switch drivers everytime I want to watch TV. :thumbsdown:

 

[Golgatha]

Known Issues Under the Windows XP Operating System

The following section provides a summary of open issues in the latest version of Catalyst?. These include:

* Enabling CrossFire? in the Radeon? HD2900 XT will result in an error message and Crossfire will not actually be enabled. Further information and a hotfix for this issue can be found in topic number 737-28188.
* Enabling CrossFire? may result in display corruption being noticed when playing a DVD or media clip using either WinDVD 7, Windows Media Player or PowerDVD 6. Further details can be found in topic number 737-22806
* Catalyst? Control Center->OverDrive?: The OverDrive? setting are not retained for individual accounts. This issue may also be experienced under the Windows Vista operating system. Further details can be found in topic number 737-25805
* Launching the release notes under the Japanese or Chinese version of Windows may result in the release notes displaying a blank page. This issue may also be experienced under the Windows Vista operating system. Further details can be found in topic number 737-26749. This issue is resolved in Catalyst 7.7
* Some pixilated corruption may be observed while running the game Prey while hovering over the health packs from a distance on some hardware configurations running Win XP. Further details can be found in topic number 737-27091
* The system may become unresponsive and require a reboot while randomly moving Video Player window from primary to extended desktop under certain hardware configurations where the second adapter is an ATI Radeon? X1200/1250/1270 series of product. Further details can be found in topic number 737-27092
* Connecting two display devices to an ATI Radeon? X1600 series product may result in the device manager failing to detect the secondary display device. Further information may be found in topic number 737-21266
* Corruption may be noticed when playing certain DVD titles when hardware acceleration is enabled on ATI Radeon? HD 2900 XT product. Further details can be found in topic number 737-27624


Pretty awesome that they can predict what they will fix and in what release number.

 

[mruffin75]

Originally posted by: Golgatha
Known Issues Under the Windows XP Operating System

The following section provides a summary of open issues in the latest version of Catalyst?. These include:



Pretty awesome that they can predict what they will fix and in what release number.

They probably already have a "fix" in the works.. but it was too late to include it in this release (after all, you have to go through beta testing etc. before release)..

 

[LOUISSSSS]

what does the Avivo Package do???

 

[fern420]

damn i feel like a numbnut, i totally missed that on the release notes. many thanks for pointing that out to me. that sure does seem like a pretty big feature to not have working in a driver release to me.

 

[KeithTalent]

Originally posted by: fern420
damn i feel like a numbnut, i totally missed that on the release notes. many thanks for pointing that out to me. that sure does seem like a pretty big feature to not have working in a driver release to me.

So have you tried the 7.6s with the hotfix yet? I'm thinking about downloading them when I get home from work, but if you have any input, it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
KT

 

[fern420]

Originally posted by: KeithTalent
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: fern420
damn i feel like a numbnut, i totally missed that on the release notes. many thanks for pointing that out to me. that sure does seem like a pretty big feature to not have working in a driver release to me.</end quote></div>

So have you tried the 7.6s with the hotfix yet? I'm thinking about downloading them when I get home from work, but if you have any input, it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
KT

installing right now, ill check back in a few after i try some games.

im hoping that they did some tweaking for the new quake wars beta but ive already heard they did not. its an absolute mess on any ati cards and its not due to eye candy, id have to say the engine looks very old and outdated, almost to the edge of unacceptable , you can clearly tell its 3 years old.

 

[KeithTalent]

Originally posted by: fern420
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: KeithTalent
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: fern420
damn i feel like a numbnut, i totally missed that on the release notes. many thanks for pointing that out to me. that sure does seem like a pretty big feature to not have working in a driver release to me.</end quote></div>

So have you tried the 7.6s with the hotfix yet? I'm thinking about downloading them when I get home from work, but if you have any input, it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
KT</end quote></div>

installing right now, ill check back in a few after i try some games.

im hoping that they did some tweaking for the new quake wars beta but ive already heard they did not. its an absolute mess on any ati cards and its not due to eye candy, id have to say the engine looks very old and outdated, almost to the edge of unacceptable , you can clearly tell its 3 years old.

I did not find it quite that bad, once I disabled Crossfire and tweaked the settings. Not sure if you had this problem, but I could not use AA in the game at all, it would give me crazy graphical glitches.

After all of that was sorted out, the game was actually playable and looked OK. You are right though, it looks a little dated.

KT

 

[fern420]

yep, also cant use aa in the quake wars demo. it also defaults to 30fps and 60 hrtz refresh rate, theres no way to adjust the refresh rate, even using the console command. i was able to break the fps limit but it still looked like a turd in a paper bag to me, hehehe.

ohh quick update, the new popup window that asks to reboot after enabling crossfire is now gone with the hotfix. it does not ask to reboot when you enable crossfire. testing some games right now.



arggg, new update


now the quake wars beta will not open full screen, only windowed and theres noway to change it, try changing the resolution in quakewars in game and it completely crashes the pc, not a blue screen or ctdt, i mean full blown crash of the machine. if it isnt one thing its another.........

edit again


reinstalled quake wars and now it works. you can also use the AA now. i must say it looks 100% better than it did with 7.5

 

[SynthDude2001]

I don't bother to install new Catalyst driver releases anymore (except for the OpenGL DLL usually). I've gotten consistently lower Direct3D performance with every new release, as compared to 7.1 (which is what I run now).

This is with a Radeon 9700 Pro (ancient, I'm well aware) in Windows Vista x64 (x86 showed the same performance trends in my testing).

 

[KeithTalent]

Originally posted by: fern420
yep, also cant use aa in the quake wars demo. it also defaults to 30fps and 60 hrtz refresh rate, theres no way to adjust the refresh rate, even using the console command. i was able to break the fps limit but it still looked like a turd in a paper bag to me, hehehe.

ohh quick update, the new popup window that asks to reboot after enabling crossfire is now gone with the hotfix. it does not ask to reboot when you enable crossfire. testing some games right now.



arggg, new update


now the quake wars beta will not open full screen, only windowed and theres noway to change it, try changing the resolution in quakewars in game and it completely crashes the pc, not a blue screen or ctdt, i mean full blown crash of the machine. if it isnt one thing its another.........

edit again


reinstalled quake wars and now it works. you can also use the AA now. i must say it looks 100% better than it did with 7.5

Awesome, thanks for the update. I'm looking forward to getting this up and running and will be interested to see Quake Wars with AA finally!

Cheers,
KT

 

[s44]

Is it Win2K incompatible now? I've been trying to upgrade from 7.2 (x1900xt) and no dice.