Catalyst 10.5 betas [8.730]

[Madcatatlas]

That's Timber Wolf and Mad Dog to you freebirther

haha!

 

[buckshot24]

These prerelease drivers are always ginormous.

 

[SSChevy2001]

The exact same components repeated 6 times for 6 operating systems

Also there seems to be Intel drivers merged together with the ATi drivers.

What's up with that?

 

[Tempered81]

Also there seems to be Intel drivers merged together with the ATi drivers.

What's up with that?

No idea. Maybe to be sure your chipset is up-to-date as possible when loading the newer drivers - there's even raid drivers in there - looks like motherboard updates. AMD chipset drivers are there too. Direct 3d version of these is 750, while the next newest I could find are 735 in the 10.3b betas. Terry 'CatalystMaker' Makedon is tweeting that he doesn't know where these came from and 'he would never load them himself'. Sounds fishy. :0 Ie don't expect any support since this is in no way official, pre-release, beta, alpha or anything else. It's just ripped off the driver team's computers. These drivers are so much further down the line and they are leaked internally. There's even some people joining the guru3d thread saying that they are fake. (Which is funny because they are doing a great job really running real games on real hardware on my machine ;p).

They're very green and are intended to be the 'WOW' drivers for after Fermi release according to a poster at Guru3D. Another obvious sign supporting the 'stolen / leaked' theory is that this one rar includes everything the driver team works on. MCE Drivers, Crossfire profiles, APP profiles, .net, Visual C++ run-times, Online Registration, Communication opt-in, ATI problem report wizard, Hydravision, Opencl, opengl, d3d, avivo, CCC, WMD, HDMI, WMV decoder, install manager, and everything in between all the way down to the video encoder integrated into CCC. It even has smartgart for AGP... They are the most complete set i've ever seen; however you might find parts of it to be useless bloatware, and there could be tons of bugs yet to be ironed out. It's a bit overkill IMO, I always go for the minimal installation. You can still manually install only the display driver if you wish and keep older CCC versions, or even no CCC at all. This definitely isn't for the newbie who will likely install over his old set, BSOD, and need to call tech support to figure out how to boot back to windows. Someone else posted gains in BC2 from 55 fps to 75 fps, but I haven't noticed anything that big. In BC2 my 4890 is only slightly smoother on these than the 10.3b march 29 drivers, and there is still flickering in some of the grass textures.

 

[HurleyBird]

I beleive it is because this release has mobility drivers and support for switchable graphics. The package basically has it all, hence the size.

 

[T2k]

What exactly is in there that makes the package so huge?
I remember the AT article where the bulk of NV's driver set was physx related, hence ATis smaller without it. Now the tables really have turned...

Who knows, maybe in a few years we will look back and say

hey, remember when the vga drivers were under 500MB?

It's this goddamn buggy crap called .NET from Micro$hit...

 

[ComputerDude67]

"does it (finally!?!?!) fix the grey screen crashes? 'Cos I'm tired of using my old card, and paying the "Too Late To RMA" penalty because I tried to work with the maker rather than sending it back right away."

You may want to return the card. I have a Sapphire 5850 and have not even had one crash since I bought it 2 weeks ago. I even have it overclocked. Before this I had a 4870 1GB board which was solid as a rock.

 

[T2k]

Running it for a day or two... nothing extraordinary. Only tried with BF:BC2 and some older Steam game though.