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New to ATI - drivers?

M

mashedpotatoes

n00b
Joined
Jul 3, 2006
Messages
18
Having been an nvidia user for the last 7 years I've joined the red team after succumbing to a super cheap x1950 pro 512mb. I'm seeing a bit of confusion about which drivers to use though, which set is best for xp? I'm planning to have a second, much more glorious (my 6800nu struggled...) playthrough on oblivion, do I still need a driver hack to get aa/hdr?

The card should be arriving tomorrow and I think i'll pick up stalker and test drive unlimited to show off the card, i'll be stuck at 1280x1024, will I be able to use the full dynamic lighting in stalker at that res/high eye candy?

EDIT: and no "should've got the XT" posts please, I know, but you can't find an XT in the uk with 512mb for anywhere near the £80 I spent for this ;)
 
it's not exactly any different than nVidia. Go to the website and download the latest drivers for the card under the XP category, and make sure the old drivers are completely gone on your system by using Driver Cleaner or re-installing XP.
 
You have a choice of a driver with the control panel and the one without it.

When I had an X700 Pro, I chose the "driver only". I don't like the fact you have to install .NET simply because when I reboot my computer, I don't want to have to click on anything.:eek:

I just received my X1650 XT and am very excited. I want to sleep before installing it however. :p
 
Well if you do not like to install .Net and CCC you can try Ati TrayTools or ATItool. Personally I like TrayTools bit better, it gives very nice overall control of the card, too bad it does not like my Projector so had to go CCC & ATItool route.
 
As for drivers, many people also like the Omega drivers, which are modified ATI drivers.
 
mashedpotatoes said:
will I be able to use the full dynamic lighting in stalker at that res/high eye candy?
Click to expand...


I have an X1900XT 512 and believe it or not, it struggles to run the game with full dynamic lighting. But I've made several tweaks and have improved the performance immensely.

The stalker thread over at arsctechnica has some great tips to change the configuration with only a small loss in quality. It made a huge difference on my system. I'd guess a 50% boost in FPS. It was that drastic ! :)
 
Check sig for current ATI drivers, I haven't bothered to update; it runs everything fine.
 
Thanks for the replies guys! I downloaded the standard driver with ccc and was amazed that windows was using 100mb more at boot. Thankfully I find that I can safely disable most of that but having to dive into msconfig and services.msc to do so was a bit annoying. Got it running at pretty much the same memory usage as nvidia now.

The control panel layout is a bit of a mess but I like some of the extra options. Being able to set vsync always on unless app specifies no is nice. Being able to run 16x AF with little performance drop is even better!

Not tried stalker yet, still trying to get oblivon and expansions running the way I want them. Haven't found the hdr/aa method yet but i'll keep googling. Looking forward to having to tweak the arse out of stalker too... not! Ahh, PC gaming how I love thee.

Oh, and i'll probably figure this out myself eventually but is adaptive aa like transparency aa for nvidia? Not too sure about the worth of temporal aa versus normal aa either. Opinions?
 
A few answers:

- Neither .Net nor CCC install anything I have to click when I reboot my PC
- I have two X1900s and still struggle to run Stalker with full eye candy (although I'm using 1600x1200)
- There shouldn't be anything to disable in msconfig. You can do it through CCC itself. Turn off the system tray icon and the hotkeys, and disable ATi Smart in services.msc. IMPORTANT - DO NOT DISABLE THE ATI HOTKEY POLLER. If you do your card will remain at 2D clockspeeds all of the time instead of clocking up in 3D applications as it's supposed to.
- To get HDR+AA in Oblivion, assuming you're using a recent driver, force AA in CCC by selecting your required level, then turn AA off and HDR on in Oblivion.
- Yes, adaptive AA is like transparency AA. It works on textures with transparent areas, e.g. wire fences.
- Temporal AA gives twice the quality of the same setting of standard (spatial) AA, however it requires v-sync be on (in fact selecting temporal AA will force v-sync regardless of any other settings) and only operates when the frame rate is 60FPS or above. Below that it turns itself off.
 
Thanks, very helpful post. I had disabled the ati hotkey thing, the tweak guide I read implied it was only important if you overclock but reenabling the service gave me another 5 or so fps in oblivion.

Shan't bother with the temporal aa, 30ish fps with as much eye candy as i can get is usually preferable to 60fps for me.
 
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