ATI Radeon Drivers in Win2k

[jayshah]

I know that the Radeon drivers aren't so hot under win2k, but that was a while ago. Does anyone know how the latest drivers perform compared to 9x? I'm trying to decide whether to dual boot. Changing video cards isn't really a good option for me.

 

[Rand]

The latest Radeon drivers for Windows 2000 are significantly better then they were at one point in time, their still not 100% though, and until they are you'll likely have somewhat better gaming performance under 9X.
They are improving though, and their much more reliable, and performance is getting closer to what it is under 9X.
Most of the more popular games tend to perform pretty equally between them now but in other games you'll still lose about 10-30% compared to Win9X.

Still, like I said their improving, and they are at least useable now.
Compatbility seems pretty good, and the rest of the cards capabilities such as DVD etc. is already up to the standards under 9X.

I'd suggest dual-booting with Win2k just for the pure stability, reliability and security Windows 2000 offers. You can always boot back into 9X for your gaming.

 

[jayshah]

Thanks Rand. My orignal plan was to have only win2k, cuase I've been running my P2 350 on win2k only for over a year with very few major problems. I think I'll end up configuring dual boot on both systems (my current P2 and the new athlon I just ordered) eventually.

I'd love to hear more opinions.

 

[jobberd]

rand pretty much got it right on. The Radeon drivers in win2k are improving, but still aren't 100%. If it matters that much, dual boot with win98. I personally don't mind the small decrease in performance as long as the stability is good, so I only run in win2k

 

[Yoshi]

The drivers continue to improve for Radeon in Win2k. I only use Win2k so I really don't know how the current Win2k drivers stack up against the current Win9x drivers.

I have never had any stability problems with ATI's Win2k drivers and as I mentioned above from a numbers standpoint the drivers have shown improvement.

 

[Stealth1024]

I'm running Win2000Pro with an ATI 64MB DDR card and stability seems great until I try using ATI's Video-In program. I experience random system lockups, etc.