If you're concerned solely on stabilty and product life then I would recommend installing the drivers that came with your video card. If your video card dies because of it your warranty will still be well intact.
Esevez: Welcome to short-media... Your english is, as far as I can tell, perfect... If you hadn't told me, I wouldn't have known that english was not your native language
0
Geeky1University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
edited October 2003
Esevez, the 3.5s are totally, completely safe. It's only the 3.8s that appear to have a problem.
Geeky1 had this to say Esevez, the 3.5s are totally, completely safe. It's only the 3.8s that appear to have a problem.
Also, as prime said, your English is flawless.
Then finally my constant reading of english fantasy novels was worth something Anyone read the "Otherland" series? VERY nice mix of fantasy and sci-fi...
To stay on topic: What exactly are the problems with Open GL in Cat 3.6 and 3.7? Are all Open GL games affected or only a few?
Greetings from Old Europe
---
Fry: "Hey, wait! I'm having one of those things!
You know, a headache with pictures..."
Leela: "An idea?"
How can you guys say you speak the language right when you don't even pronounce your "R"s properly? All the proper english speakers came to the new world, mate... hate to tell you.
primesuspect had this to say How can you guys say you speak the language right when you don't even pronounce your "R"s properly? All the proper english speakers came to the new world, mate... hate to tell you.
SimGuy had this to say Their team of world-class engineers and software developers have been working steadily and diligently attempting to re-create the identical conditions under which these hardware failures may have occurred.
"World-class engineers"?
Man, did they brainwash you or threaten to sue your ass off?
According to one of the articles linked here, ATI at least acknowledged that the 3.8s sometimes identify two monitors even if there is only one installed. That was exactly what happened when I installed the driver and IMHO if there is one problem between the driver and the monitor, there might be another.
I already had the problem with the 3.7s who set the refresh rate of my monitor to 60Hz, no matter what DDC info my Samtron 96P handed to the driver. I am no pro, but logic dictates me, that if a driver gets DDC info wrong and sets the refresh rate too low, it might as well set it too high.
Anyhow, as long as ATI claims that there is no problem and people claim that there is one, this matter won't be solved. Ultimately it might be the wisest thing to do, if ATI has the machine of one of the people who claim that their monitor blew sent to them, stick another 9800/9700 in it, hook the same montor model to it and repeat the same conditions that according to the owner of the PC led to the monitor's untimely end.
I really don't know what or whom to believe in this matter. There probably is a number of people who for whatever reason jumped on the "driver killed monitor" bandwagon. There might be one single individual who wanted his personal vendetta against ATI and caused the mess. But still, there also is the possibility that under certain conditions the driver does cause damage.
Last but not least I'd like to say I wish no ill to ATI. I consciously chose an ATI card when I decided to get a new one, as I like to support an underdog opposed to a developing monopoly, and my 9700P is a card that delivers. Whenever comes the time that I again need a new graphics card, ATI will be my first choice.
If in the end this really did start from a bad joke played on all of us by some sick individual for whatever reason, man, I hope ATI sues your ass off!
If there really is a problem with the driver, I hope that you, ATI, can recognize that standing up to it is a smaller PR disaster than trying to cover it up and being caught doing so.
Infidel
(PS. I am from Germany too and all you English and American suckers should know that all you are speaking is a degenerated Germanic dialect )
If in the end this really did start from a bad joke played on all of us by some sick individual for whatever reason, man, I hope ATI sues your ass off!
So if they screwed up, can we sue their ass off? Come on man.
Infidel, I respect your opinion, and I think you make a good point in a very general sense.
Not having much of a (...see the sig...) dog in this fight, I do want to state that it is through my participation in these forums that I had pretty much decided that my upcoming major upgrade will include an ATI card. That hasn't changed merely because there is a question about one driver release.
I'll be buying hardware. If there is a driver problem, I'm sure it will be sorted out soon. Much sooner than it would have been if no one had spoken up about it.
You qualified your remarks with the term "possible". Fair enough, that sort of stupid behavior has occured before. But I can tell you firsthand that "fanboy" antics wouldn't last long here.
We have too many people who know the score to allow that - on both sides.
Over my years I have read many an arm chair response to these types of situations. Posters speak of promoting or taking legal action and other such directions. It is quite an intimidating thought when faced with a person or company who has more money and more lawyers than you do. Beyond that is the first stage of determining the exact cause and this is a mountainous task. It is easy to be part of the problem but harder to be a part of the solution.
You'll find that the originator of the thread had and still has the best intentions for the members of this community which you are now a part of. A personal vendetta is rather easy to sniff out. It eventually becomes very apparent. I do not believe there was reason for any personal agenda with this matter and you are quite correct that this alleged matter is still unresolved.
There is a situation that developed around the Catalyst 3.8 drivers. Whether the drivers are to blame or a fluke combination of circumstances there still remains many people with damaged hardware and no explanation other than installing the drivers and then having damaged or temporarily non-functioning hardware afterwards.
It is our goal to help find an answer.
It is not our goal to blame ATI.
This thread took off and the other media love bad news. The old saying goes "If it bleeds it leads". The owners of Short-Media and the members do not want to be a part of or promote a personal agenda, vendetta or hoax. This is NOT our mandate. This is not why we are here. I would not, along with many others, be putting 40+ hours a week of my time into this site for any reason other than wanting to give Short-Media and its members the respect they deserve.
I hope you stick around and enjoy our little corner of the web. We'd surely like to have you do so.
And to make sure I came across as I meant to: When I talked about "fanboys" I didn't mean the rather reasonable people on this board, especially not SimGuy. It is not my impression that he deliberately tries to hurt ATI. He just states what he believes can be facts and facts they possibly are.
Infidel
(PS and OT again: German is not a Roman language, French, Italian, Spanish and Portguese are).
(PPS. How in the world did all this end up in a topic about a graphics driver, anyway? )
A SUMMARY (taken mainly from this thread and Rage3D sticky)
the basic glitches
The most notorious and frequent malfunction noted has been flickering several times when entering games or another application that uses a resolution different than desktop does.
Sometimes you lose your video signal though Windows keeps working and the only way out is to reboot
CAT 3.8 lists two monitors for each monitor present in your system, this cannot be bypassed and each time driver is innitialized appears again if you have eliminated spurious monitors.
In some cases it heats up your video card when using 3D apps (up to 10ºC or so).
further (and infrequent) complaints:
some Radeon cards have quitted working with no apparent cause (i.e. no modding no overclocking no tweaking involved)
Monitor quits working right after one of those flickering episodes; one user said it happened just in rebooting after first time installing 3.8.
Most times this needs monitor hardware repair; one user only lost the resolution monitor was entering at when this occurred.
There are informations about flickering being rapid change of signal through several incompatible resolutions; in one case Viewsonic informed that this was the cause of monitor failing, at least in this case the rapid succesion of incompatible resolutions nullified protective mechanisms.
It appears that no problem occurs if VPU Recovery is deactivated.
There is unprouved information on there being compilation errors in the final 3.8 version, causing at least some duplicated files.
My theory: there is conflicting information in use in drivers about resolution and sometimes an overactive VPU Recovery runs through this information causing rapid change through incompatible resolutions and thereby these problems.
- Events leading up to the video card failing (were you playing or doing anything specific at the time).
I play Unreal Tournament 2003 a lot. Before installing the 3.8 drivers I did have an occasional freeze maybe 1-2 times a month, but not very often. Of course I had to reboot to get the system back. After installing 3.8 drivers it seemed to work fine for the first couple days but soon the game would freeze often, perhaps after 5-10 minutes of play. I found out that the VPU recovery was kicking in and saying that the card was not responding and it had been reset. However the game was still running and after about two minutes the game would start playing again without even needing to restart it. I thought this was a great feature, except that it seemed to kick in even when the game was running normally.
I turned off the VPU recovery feature since it was not allowing me to play for more than a few minutes at a time. After that, the freezing continued but less often, and of course I had to reboot now.
When the card died, I had been playing UT2k3 and it froze and I rebooted. Everything seemed normal. I was watching TV for a while and the machine was sitting idle. All of a sudden the screen changed to 640x480 16 color mode. I didn't do anything about it right away. When I tried to use the computer again it was frozen. When I rebooted I couldn't get a video signal. The card has been dead ever since. I tried leaving the computer off and booting it the next day a few times, but it was still dead.
Also, I had recently cleaned the fan and heat sync of dust so that it had good airflow. My system doesn't have a ton of cooling in it, but I was running with the side panel off when it died, and I think the system was not running terribly hot except for the 8500.
- Were there any BIOS flashes or modifications applied to your Video Card?
None, until reading through the Short-Media forum I didn't even know this was possible.
- Was your system over-clocked in any way, if so, how was this done?
I had overclocked the CPU at one point for about a month, but then I put it back to normal settings because of decreased hard drive performance with the overclock. I was running the 3.0 at 3.45 GHz (15% oc) via the easy settings in the Asus P4-800 BIOS. (this is a P4 875 chipset)
- Do you recall the monitor driver installed? Was it Plug and Play monitor, default monitor or some other monitor driver?
I have the Mitsubishi 2070u driver installed.
- Did you manually adjust the refresh rate on your monitor or were default monitor refresh rate settings used? i.e. did you use the advance display properties option under the Monitor tab to manually set your refresh rate?
Yes, I ran it at 100Hz for a while, then set it back to 85Hz because the image seemed less fuzzy. This is at 1600x1200 resolution. It had been that way for about 6 months.
First: Have I seen that 640x480 16 bit desktop? Yes. In the first 30 minutes of the card's life as the PC froze only 1 test into SPECVIEW PERF. It dumped to that desktop then froze. Reboot time.
Will 3DMARK 2001SE run? Not yet. I've been benchmarking for 2 years and 1 year on this hardware combination, except the video card, and all components test fine.
UT2003 benches run and so does Code creatures and GL Excess. Scores are as predicted.
The 9700 PRO on the 3.8 cats with a thermistor taped to the back of the GPU. 25.6 C room IDLE 46.5 and LOAD 52.9 C. The 9800 PRO with same thermistor position. 23.2 C room IDLE 45.6 and Load 49.2 C. Both loads were determined after 1 run of 3DMARK 2001 SE at 640. Yes 3DMARK will start but it craps out during or just at the close of the 640 test...won't continue to the 800 test.
I'm not saying anything...just reporting results.
UPDATE: Not the CAT 3.8's. Had the HDD ghosted so installed the 3.6 CATs...same prob.
Updated Update: God I hate when things just don't do what they are supposed to do. Going to reinstall 9700 PRO and see if everyhting works...which it did a while back but this is what trouble shooting is all about. lordy.
I have a 9600 /pro. 3.8 running since release date. NO PROBLEMS. I did overclock once, don't remember the settings, and got a garbage screen (sony gpd400), but on reboot everything was ok. I have continued to run it almost 24h4s/ day since first read this thread last week.
To be safe(and to try the Call of Duty demos which crash using 3.8 cat drivers)I've installed 3.7 drivers over my old 3.8 drivers. The only problem is now I can't watch TV on my computer! I hear the sound but no picture. No problem watching tv on 3.8! Help!!
a couple of days back I posted that I had crashing problems and a damn hot Radeonb 9800 Pro and Cat 3.8.
I solved the problem (don't laugh) -> My graphics card fan did not run properly i.e. the whole card became a heat absorber.
It did not have anything to do with the Catalyst drivers, but I have the 3.7 installed now just to be on the safe side.
Cya,
Vordack
0
LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited October 2003
I've installed 3.7 drivers over my old 3.8 drivers.
Nvidia or ATI, installing over the top usually brings poor results. You need to completely, 100% wipe out the old drivers before rolling back to previous drivers or before installing new.
Comments
Il leave the graphic gurus to answer your question
Thanks for lurking no longer
.. and don't worry about the language/spelling ...
Half of us have only just a grip on our own native language.. which is English
You are totally safe with regards to your hardware in using the Catalyst 3.7 series of display drivers.
BTW, Welcome to the forum
Sleep is for the weak
Also, as prime said, your English is flawless.
Then finally my constant reading of english fantasy novels was worth something
To stay on topic: What exactly are the problems with Open GL in Cat 3.6 and 3.7? Are all Open GL games affected or only a few?
Greetings from Old Europe
---
Fry: "Hey, wait! I'm having one of those things!
You know, a headache with pictures..."
Leela: "An idea?"
(Futurama; Episode 4-05)
I was born, bred and still living in England
Don't confuse me for one of those over the water who mangle my precious language by removing letters from words like COLOUR
OR do you guys spell it "Propour" or something...
Think about it like this. English. Examine the word carefully. Notice anything??
ENGLAND.
Well you don't live there and I do
It's why it's called the Queens English. Not the Presidents English
someone's been watching too many yankie movies
This place is so homely
"World-class engineers"?
Man, did they brainwash you or threaten to sue your ass off?
According to one of the articles linked here, ATI at least acknowledged that the 3.8s sometimes identify two monitors even if there is only one installed. That was exactly what happened when I installed the driver and IMHO if there is one problem between the driver and the monitor, there might be another.
I already had the problem with the 3.7s who set the refresh rate of my monitor to 60Hz, no matter what DDC info my Samtron 96P handed to the driver. I am no pro, but logic dictates me, that if a driver gets DDC info wrong and sets the refresh rate too low, it might as well set it too high.
Anyhow, as long as ATI claims that there is no problem and people claim that there is one, this matter won't be solved. Ultimately it might be the wisest thing to do, if ATI has the machine of one of the people who claim that their monitor blew sent to them, stick another 9800/9700 in it, hook the same montor model to it and repeat the same conditions that according to the owner of the PC led to the monitor's untimely end.
I really don't know what or whom to believe in this matter. There probably is a number of people who for whatever reason jumped on the "driver killed monitor" bandwagon. There might be one single individual who wanted his personal vendetta against ATI and caused the mess. But still, there also is the possibility that under certain conditions the driver does cause damage.
Last but not least I'd like to say I wish no ill to ATI. I consciously chose an ATI card when I decided to get a new one, as I like to support an underdog opposed to a developing monopoly, and my 9700P is a card that delivers. Whenever comes the time that I again need a new graphics card, ATI will be my first choice.
If in the end this really did start from a bad joke played on all of us by some sick individual for whatever reason, man, I hope ATI sues your ass off!
If there really is a problem with the driver, I hope that you, ATI, can recognize that standing up to it is a smaller PR disaster than trying to cover it up and being caught doing so.
Infidel
(PS. I am from Germany too and all you English and American suckers should know that all you are speaking is a degenerated Germanic dialect
So if they screwed up, can we sue their ass off? Come on man.
Yes, you could sue them. But practically the question is if the price of a monitor is worth going through with it.
However, from ATI's point of view the question is possibly many unsold graphics cards due to the rumor and therefore a much bigger loss.
It would also set a nice precedent for all those Nvidia/ATI fanboys who willingly start religious crusades like the one possibly here.
Infidel
Not having much of a (...see the sig...) dog in this fight, I do want to state that it is through my participation in these forums that I had pretty much decided that my upcoming major upgrade will include an ATI card. That hasn't changed merely because there is a question about one driver release.
I'll be buying hardware. If there is a driver problem, I'm sure it will be sorted out soon. Much sooner than it would have been if no one had spoken up about it.
You qualified your remarks with the term "possible". Fair enough, that sort of stupid behavior has occured before. But I can tell you firsthand that "fanboy" antics wouldn't last long here.
We have too many people who know the score to allow that - on both sides.
You'll find that the originator of the thread had and still has the best intentions for the members of this community which you are now a part of. A personal vendetta is rather easy to sniff out. It eventually becomes very apparent. I do not believe there was reason for any personal agenda with this matter and you are quite correct that this alleged matter is still unresolved.
There is a situation that developed around the Catalyst 3.8 drivers. Whether the drivers are to blame or a fluke combination of circumstances there still remains many people with damaged hardware and no explanation other than installing the drivers and then having damaged or temporarily non-functioning hardware afterwards.
It is our goal to help find an answer.
It is not our goal to blame ATI.
This thread took off and the other media love bad news. The old saying goes "If it bleeds it leads". The owners of Short-Media and the members do not want to be a part of or promote a personal agenda, vendetta or hoax. This is NOT our mandate. This is not why we are here. I would not, along with many others, be putting 40+ hours a week of my time into this site for any reason other than wanting to give Short-Media and its members the respect they deserve.
I hope you stick around and enjoy our little corner of the web. We'd surely like to have you do so.
And to make sure I came across as I meant to: When I talked about "fanboys" I didn't mean the rather reasonable people on this board, especially not SimGuy. It is not my impression that he deliberately tries to hurt ATI. He just states what he believes can be facts and facts they possibly are.
Infidel
(PS and OT again: German is not a Roman language, French, Italian, Spanish and Portguese are).
(PPS. How in the world did all this end up in a topic about a graphics driver, anyway?
the basic glitches
- The most notorious and frequent malfunction noted has been flickering several times when entering games or another application that uses a resolution different than desktop does.
- Sometimes you lose your video signal though Windows keeps working and the only way out is to reboot
- CAT 3.8 lists two monitors for each monitor present in your system, this cannot be bypassed and each time driver is innitialized appears again if you have eliminated spurious monitors.
- In some cases it heats up your video card when using 3D apps (up to 10ºC or so).
further (and infrequent) complaints:- some Radeon cards have quitted working with no apparent cause (i.e. no modding no overclocking no tweaking involved)
- Monitor quits working right after one of those flickering episodes; one user said it happened just in rebooting after first time installing 3.8.
It appears that no problem occurs if VPU Recovery is deactivated.Most times this needs monitor hardware repair; one user only lost the resolution monitor was entering at when this occurred.
There are informations about flickering being rapid change of signal through several incompatible resolutions; in one case Viewsonic informed that this was the cause of monitor failing, at least in this case the rapid succesion of incompatible resolutions nullified protective mechanisms.
There is unprouved information on there being compilation errors in the final 3.8 version, causing at least some duplicated files.
My theory: there is conflicting information in use in drivers about resolution and sometimes an overactive VPU Recovery runs through this information causing rapid change through incompatible resolutions and thereby these problems.
I play Unreal Tournament 2003 a lot. Before installing the 3.8 drivers I did have an occasional freeze maybe 1-2 times a month, but not very often. Of course I had to reboot to get the system back. After installing 3.8 drivers it seemed to work fine for the first couple days but soon the game would freeze often, perhaps after 5-10 minutes of play. I found out that the VPU recovery was kicking in and saying that the card was not responding and it had been reset. However the game was still running and after about two minutes the game would start playing again without even needing to restart it. I thought this was a great feature, except that it seemed to kick in even when the game was running normally.
I turned off the VPU recovery feature since it was not allowing me to play for more than a few minutes at a time. After that, the freezing continued but less often, and of course I had to reboot now.
When the card died, I had been playing UT2k3 and it froze and I rebooted. Everything seemed normal. I was watching TV for a while and the machine was sitting idle. All of a sudden the screen changed to 640x480 16 color mode. I didn't do anything about it right away. When I tried to use the computer again it was frozen. When I rebooted I couldn't get a video signal. The card has been dead ever since. I tried leaving the computer off and booting it the next day a few times, but it was still dead.
Also, I had recently cleaned the fan and heat sync of dust so that it had good airflow. My system doesn't have a ton of cooling in it, but I was running with the side panel off when it died, and I think the system was not running terribly hot except for the 8500.
- Were there any BIOS flashes or modifications applied to your Video Card?
None, until reading through the Short-Media forum I didn't even know this was possible.
- Was your system over-clocked in any way, if so, how was this done?
I had overclocked the CPU at one point for about a month, but then I put it back to normal settings because of decreased hard drive performance with the overclock. I was running the 3.0 at 3.45 GHz (15% oc) via the easy settings in the Asus P4-800 BIOS. (this is a P4 875 chipset)
- Do you recall the monitor driver installed? Was it Plug and Play monitor, default monitor or some other monitor driver?
I have the Mitsubishi 2070u driver installed.
- Did you manually adjust the refresh rate on your monitor or were default monitor refresh rate settings used? i.e. did you use the advance display properties option under the Monitor tab to manually set your refresh rate?
Yes, I ran it at 100Hz for a while, then set it back to 85Hz because the image seemed less fuzzy. This is at 1600x1200 resolution. It had been that way for about 6 months.
First: Have I seen that 640x480 16 bit desktop? Yes. In the first 30 minutes of the card's life as the PC froze only 1 test into SPECVIEW PERF. It dumped to that desktop then froze. Reboot time.
Will 3DMARK 2001SE run? Not yet. I've been benchmarking for 2 years and 1 year on this hardware combination, except the video card, and all components test fine.
UT2003 benches run and so does Code creatures and GL Excess. Scores are as predicted.
The 9700 PRO on the 3.8 cats with a thermistor taped to the back of the GPU. 25.6 C room IDLE 46.5 and LOAD 52.9 C. The 9800 PRO with same thermistor position. 23.2 C room IDLE 45.6 and Load 49.2 C. Both loads were determined after 1 run of 3DMARK 2001 SE at 640. Yes 3DMARK will start but it craps out during or just at the close of the 640 test...won't continue to the 800 test.
I'm not saying anything...just reporting results.
UPDATE: Not the CAT 3.8's. Had the HDD ghosted so installed the 3.6 CATs...same prob.
Updated Update: God I hate when things just don't do what they are supposed to do. Going to reinstall 9700 PRO and see if everyhting works...which it did a while back but this is what trouble shooting is all about. lordy.
a couple of days back I posted that I had crashing problems and a damn hot Radeonb 9800 Pro and Cat 3.8.
I solved the problem (don't laugh) -> My graphics card fan did not run properly i.e. the whole card became a heat absorber.
It did not have anything to do with the Catalyst drivers, but I have the 3.7 installed now just to be on the safe side.
Cya,
Vordack
Nvidia or ATI, installing over the top usually brings poor results. You need to completely, 100% wipe out the old drivers before rolling back to previous drivers or before installing new.