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Best Catalyst ATI Driver Version To Use For Older Card

A

arh2o

Member
I have an ATI 9600XT and by vid card standards its fairly old. I recently reformatted and installed the new 5.8 ATI drivers. I ONLY play cs and tfc. Anyways the 5.8's run CS like crap, fps is constantly fluctuating, and i'm not getting the 100 fps that i used to be getting. I was wondering what ati driver version is the best for a card like mine. I heard that for older games/cards the 5.1 or 4.1x or 5.2's are good. Which are the best for mine?
 
Also my avi's take a long time to load when i skip around in it.. someone told me this is due to the drivers as well. they said that anything over 5.5 drivers are for the PCI-Express Cards.
 
Just finished replacing Catalyst 5.7 with 5.8 for my Radeon 9700 Pro - no problems at all. I also have it on another machine with a Radeon 8500. No problems at all.

I do suggest using the Control Panel version and NOT the Control Center, however.
 
Latest Cats will work with ANY Radeon card, no matter how old. If you're a gamer you want the latest drivers because they're constantly releasing fixes for newer games.

Granted sometimes the latest driver is buggy, but the 5.8 Cats have been solid so far.

I would recommend you install the regular Cats and not the ones with the ATI Control Center that requires Net Framework. It's bloatware.

 
Much in the same vein, what's the best driver for a 6600GT? I remember that my old GF2 would perform best with the v29.xx drivers when the latest were around 40+, do more recent nVidia cards still have these issues?
 
IMO you should not get the Catalyst drivers at all, at least not ones from ATi. I switched from the Cat drivers maybe a year ago and i'm not going back. What i found was www.omegadrivers.net. Its a 3rd party ATi driver that is supported by nVidia itself. It also allows for many fun features that the normal catalyst driver does not. Its based on the Catalyst driver, its just optimized. I believe the latest one uses catalyst 5.7 but i have to check that.
 
Originally posted by: linkinpark342
IMO you should not get the Catalyst drivers at all, at least not ones from ATi. I switched from the Cat drivers maybe a year ago and i'm not going back. What i found was www.omegadrivers.net. Its a 3rd party ATi driver that is supported by nVidia itself. It also allows for many fun features that the normal catalyst driver does not. Its based on the Catalyst driver, its just optimized. I believe the latest one uses catalyst 5.7 but i have to check that.
Click to expand...

Dude, stay off the pipe 😉

Only ATI writes drivers for ATI VPU's. Nvidia doesn't. Card makers don't. Guys in their mum's basement don't. It takes thousand of engineers and millions of dollars over a long period of time. Anything other than ATI's packages are just repacks with altered defaults. If it is desired to try settings in ATI's drivers which they do not provide access to via their control panel, then Ray Adam's ATI Tray Tools will allow that while still allowing to go back to certifed defaults & options.

Oh yes, back to the query at hand... 4.12 are widely recommended for 9xxx series cards. Check out the rage3d forum.
 
Originally posted by: linkinpark342
IMO you should not get the Catalyst drivers at all, at least not ones from ATi. I switched from the Cat drivers maybe a year ago and i'm not going back. What i found was www.omegadrivers.net. Its a 3rd party ATi driver that is supported by nVidia itself. It also allows for many fun features that the normal catalyst driver does not. Its based on the Catalyst driver, its just optimized. I believe the latest one uses catalyst 5.7 but i have to check that.
Click to expand...



He just tweaks the stock driver. It's still the one ATI makes.
 
As Auric said, considering that i only play an old OpenGL game i think the 4.12 drivers should be fine. I just noticed that my fps was constantly fluctuating with the latest Catalyst drivers. It wouldn't stay at a steady 100 fps. Anyways i downgraded to the 4.12 and now my fps is stable. I guess for a old 9600xt, old drivers are better. 😉
 
I've got the ancient 9000 so I'm wondering what drivers are right for me.
I have an athlon 64 2800 and I see that some (at least beta) drivers are made special for it. Should I consider them? Also, more people's opinion on whether the control center is worth installing would be great.

ok, so I haven't played a game in months and i don't see myself finding time for months to come.

Advice greatly appreciated,
Mike
 
I have this same card.

I just recently installed cat 5.7 from 5.4 & my frame rates in dawn of war tanked to the point I can't even play the game even after reducing some of the settings that I was able to use with the older ones.

The 5.4 with control panel seemed to work pretty good with this card. I'm planning on going back to the 5.4 ones this wkend.
 
I noticed that the catalyst drivers from last summer were good for the 9600xt, the ones for fall seemed to go backward, but I would probably still use catalyst 5.5 or 5.6 on a 9600xt
 
The Catalyst Control Center is very much in development. The general consensus at rage3d is that it is craptastic (although perhaps less so than at first). At some point the Control Panel will be abandoned but for older cards there may be no compelling reason for users to continue updating driver/cp versions anyway (and in fact doing so may be detrimental). In any case there remains the option of excellent third-party apps like Ray Adam's ATI Tray Tools.
 
OmegaDrivers are the best IMHO.

They arent what Auric ASSumes. He is a beta tester for ATI and with the help of the driver team he changes hidden settings to gain image quility AND performance. For older cards (9800 and lower) he normaly includes an opengl driver swapout so u can use the old one for CS/tfc(u know those crappy games based on halflife core whos communit is like a bunch of sexualy frustrated 12yo's)

Ati cant make the changes and get WHQL because ms has some very odd rules as to how things must be set to get WHQL.
The settings he changes dont advercely effect anything. Infact they enhance the game image quility and in most cases performance.

as to cs/tfc/hl1 use the omega 4.12 drivers if the latest omegas dont do the trick for you.

you can also try the ngo drivers they include alot of usefull stuff as well.

 
Ooh a beta tester. Anyone is welcome to so donate their time. It does not imply any affiliation and certainly not employment. "Hidden settings" is a tad grandiose as well. All available driver options are simply toggled via the registry. In rare cases a string or such may not exist by default but in any case tweaker proggies provide EZ access to everything known and the user need not rely upon some random dude's arbitrary settings.
 
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