Radeon 8500 drivers, getting better or not???

[Freshbrain]

Hi, I've just found a sweet deal for my ti200 which i'm selling tomorrow, and I don't feel like spending 200$+ on a GF4, so, I'm looking for the radeon 8500 or GF3 ti500.

I know ATI is having some problems with drivers and specially in some games, what I want to know is how bad are those problems and if the drivers are really improving, solving problems or not, thanks a lot.

 

[tenoc]

Current supported drivers are fine.

Use betas at your own risk. That's why they call them betas.

 

[JeremiahTheGreat]

Yes the drivers are getting better, but its advisable to head over to www.rage3d.com to grab the beta ones as they work much better.

I think the only games that have problems is Tribes 2 with a little texture corruption but otherwise it runs like a dream

 

[tazdevl]

I"ve had zero problems with the drivers since the second rev was released when the card was introduced.

Most of the problems with ATI drivers are generally due to user error, i.e. people that think they can just smack in a new video card and not do anything else.

 

[Mitzi]

Every new set of drivers continues to improve on stability and performance, though I have very few problems with the current drivers I use, the 6052 set. I'd certainly recommend a 8500!

 

[Freshbrain]

Thanks guys, looks like I'm getting the 8500 and those beta drivers, good thing they really work on drivers.

 

[zed88]

I have happily been running the 4.13.9021 drivers. I play alot of open glide games, and these drivers are very good.

According to madonions benchmarks my radeon 8500 card beats the geforce 3 ti500 by between 5-10% every time. Have fun.

Eric

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

Well, be careful.

I was using the drivers that came with the card (6036, I think) and the MMC 7.5 on my Radeon 8500DV. I was happily recording TV, etc. But I was running into a fairly consistent problem that would require reboot between recording sessions - not good for VCR-like routine recordings.

So I d/l'd both the 6037 and 6052 as well as MMC 7.6. My hell then began. I uninstalled my current drivers and rebooted and no matter what I tried, I booted to a blank screen (I tried safe mode, vga mode, last known mode etc.). It did boot - I could see it on my home network, but the blank screen couldn't be resolved. I then tried a repair installation, which so screwed up my XP installation that I ended up having to reinstall XP to a new directory.

At that point, since I couldn't get back to where I was, I decided to refresh all of my backups and start with a fresh format of XP. I got to the point in the install where I had all of my drivers (RAID, SB Audigy, VIA) working fine but not yet to the Radeon 8500. I then ghosted this to another partition as well as CD-R.

I'm glad I took the discipline to do it this way. I tried just about every damn combination of drivers and MMC I could. But only one (and that is the original CD that came with the card) resulted in a working rig. Everything else got a "TV Failed to initialize the video" nastygram. And without the ghost image to start with, I could never be certain that I had properly removed the old stuff. As previous posters pointed out, video drivers, particularly ATI, really wrap themselves around your rig's spine.

So on the original question - getting better or not, for this DV'er and light gamer, I would say not.