AMD Catalyst 7.11 Released

Wasn't that AGP problem the ATI Smart Gart service failing to load?
I seem to recall sometimes having to check that the service was set Manual/Automatic & needing to manually start it the first time in order for D3D & GDDI acceleration to be enabled

 

The install changes the startup type of the ATI Smart Gart service to Automatic, but if you have disabled it for the profile then it fails to load and the install fails to complete successfully.

 

http://en.expreview.com/?p=53&page=4

expreview's benchmarks pitting 8800GT SLI vs. 3870 CF and single card.

It's with 7.11 and the 3870's show good performance is a good 30% faster than single card... so have you checked on other sites whether this slow-down is there in CF?

Maybe it's the Unreal3 engine.. I mean. with textures set to high in GoW my 2900 starts to stutter too (haven't tried it with 7.11 though) and that seems to be the conclusion in the hardocp benchmarks as well..

 

Adaptive AA still causes rendering errors in WoW.

Has been like this forever on both of my HD cards.
Keep hoping they'll fix it with every driver release. Every time I'm disappointed.

UT3 seems to be stable now, though it stutters quite often.

 

UT3 was stuttering (several second long pauses) for me in Vista, but is fine in XP. 8800 GTX running latest betas... fyi

 

I don't remember other sites testing 3870 CF in UT3.. The strange thing is, sometimes it does run absolutely utter awesome for a minute, smooth als glas in heavy firefights, but mostly it's terrible. Maybe it's my installation which is, messed up, I dunno. Oblivion and Stalker (ingame AF= 3x the speed of CCC AF!?) are running super fast. I think it's just a combination of new games and drivers.

 

There's been several people who contacted telephone support directly and were promised fixes over the last few months for 7.10, then 7.11, now 7.12.

I wouldn't hold my breath over the rumour of a 7.12 fix based on that knowledge base entry I linked to earlier. That can easily be read as a fix purely for the 2600, and purely for it's video acceleration. As there's been no comment from anyone officially linked with driver development, or even an admission of a problem to be fixed, I'm not hopeful.

Looks like it's back to the bad old days of ATI driver development when you didn't know if drivers were going to work or not.

I mean look at this BS answer posted on AMD's own forums:

If this is true, I'm sure those people who bought brand new AGP 2600s a couple of months ago should rightfully be fuming. If it's not true, then ATI support is clueless or lying to it's customers, just like when they were closing fault reports on these broken drivers with "use earlier drivers".

 

Someone with some clout (like someone from one of the major HW review sites) needs to contact someone at AMD directly. That's the only way this issue will ever be answered clearly.

 

Just get L'Inq on the case. A headline like "Only 4 drivers a year for AGP cards" will sort the wheat from the chaff.

Jawed

 

get our names on the list! I'm in full support..

wait.. aren't those guys just reading these forums?

 

That's just the spread of your average outsourced/temp (seasonal hire) Tech Support people that you get at any company. You'll always have a few that are out of their league and will grasp at anything to get customers off the phone or keep them from replying.

The problem gets magified when you have a forum with a few thousand visitors and only people with a bad experience post. So even if only 1% of the techs are bad, after a few thousand calls someone on that forum is bound to get them.

That's the main reason I generally don't pay much attention when someone posts their response from a tech support person. After all how may people are even going to bother posting about what a great and helpful response they got? Noone, because they generally won't be trying to find answers on forums to their problems because it's already been solved.

Regards,
SB

 

It's been posted as the only official response people have, and no one else from the Catalyst program has used their online presence to contradict it. Terry Makedon was quick to jump up and say "it wasn't us" when "anonymous programmer" wrote about how difficult writing Vista drivers was, but hasn't bothered to assure customers that AGP isn't only being updated four times a year or that this major bug is being fixed ASAP. It's on AMDs own Catalyst/gaming forums for god's sake!

I'm also pretty sure that if someone did get this problem solved (as opposed to being fobbed off with some vague promise of a maybe fix some point in the future, or some four month old driver without the fixes needed for all these Christmas games), then it would be spread all over the internet.

 

these agp rumours are worrying
when it was released i bought the asrock 939dual-sata2 as it was the only board i could find that had true support for both agp, for my current card, and pci-e if i upgraded in the future. i've been steadily upgrading this computer beyond its original capabilities. as i now have the am2cpu daughterboard in here too, i am happily running an fx-62 and ddr800 ram on the same old motherboard. with an sata2 hdd as well, this system is pretty much pushed to its max without any actual overclocking.
i have been using a hercules 9800xt classic for the past few years and it has done me proud. with a stripped out and optimised winxp pro o/s, it has never let me down. i recently managed to find somewhere that still had the arctic cooler for this card (as the original was noisy and not very efficient) and it is now performing better than ever. i like this card still. sure, it doesn't have the raw fillrate and power of many newer cards but it played all of the doom3 engine games well and hl2 fantastically, both with maximum available settings, albeit with lower resolutions like 1024*768 with only 2*aa and/or 2*aniso, but that will do me fine. most of the games i like are older than these anyway, concentrating more on depth of gameplay rather than graphics alone. i know i could pick up a x1950 pro for dirt cheap but i don't want or need to really.
bottom line is, i still like my [old] agp card.
it's been long serving and is definitely not finished yet; in terms of adequate game performance, wacom tablet usage and a general crisp display for browsing or multimedia.
ok, that's enough of that. rant over

 

Did AMD produce the AGP functionality for the 2600? Or was that board manufacturers whom designed that combination?

 

It's AMD sanctioned, and is supposed to work.