CATALYST™ v3.8 available! Feedbacks here please!

[digitalwanderer]

Doh!

I was gonna say I hated the 3.8 set since I lost about 2k onions from 3dm2k1se and it would only enable 4xAGP and wouldn't activate fast-writes for me...then realized I had been dicking around with nForce2 drivers last week. :rolleyes:

Installed the proper nForce2 drivers and everything was back to normal. :cool:

I'm looking forward to goofing around with the SmartShaders, I wanna see Jedi Academy sketched... :D

[Hellbinder]

Couple things...

The Smartshader offering is in its infant stage. Brent at [H] Elaborated a bit in a thread posted there today on where this is going but i dont want to repeat it myself. I am not sure how "secretive" the plans are.

The profiles issue.

Yes, It Clearly needs some work. I was expecting there to be a good majority of people not really happy with the way its implimented. Its a great start and it actually does make things a little easier. I have profiles set up with all the various settings of FSAA+AF. It does speed things up a little when you want to jump between various combibnations of AA and AF as well as texture settings and Vsync etc.

I am personally pushing for at *least* an option to select any profiles you have from the Taskbar.

[dan2097]

Yeah radlinker still owns game profiles

The smartshader effects are cool though :)

[Rogozhin]

Hunter and Coastie, and myself have verified a problem Terry:

With IL-2 Forgotten Battles using Opengl there are bad artifacts if multitexture isn't disabled (under excellent settings) but when you disable it (excellent works like butter) you can't play with "perfect"-only see the planes and ground and sky are all blue (2d) and if you play with multitexture enabled with "perfect" you get a horrible average fps over water-fps goes way up (fastest I've seen out of all the cats-and the best looking) though when there is not very much or no water around.

rogo

[Kruno]

I have to agree with the guy who posted somewhere above about being able to "cheat" in games. I am able to see through fog in most areas and even through water and the like. I spent most of the time in MOHAA sniping people from insane distances.

It's not exactly that the shaders allow you to clearly see through fog but the fact that they give off certain funny colour signatures showing where people are is more than enough.

I don't want the effects disabled by Ati though. I just want people to turn them off when playing FPS.

[bkswaney]

well, I like them all but no freaking Overdrive on 9800 Pro's. :(

Does anyone know if Rage3d tweak works on these new drivers?

[tieros]

Definitely a huge step forward!

No mucking about to clean things up prior to the upgrade, and no BSOD during card detection. Those were the two biggest issues I had with the prior Catalyst drivers. Now who was it on here that called me an idiot for mentioning my dislike of the previous Catalyst driver dance? :D :D

I haven't run any benches or tests yet, but everyone so far has reported no change in performance, or slight gains, which is awesome for a feature-focused release.

[saturnotaku]

These drivers appear to have fixed my lockup problems with NFS: Hot Pursuit 2, which is a very good thing. However, I'm noticing one problem. If I set FSAA in Direct3D to 2x, it shows up in the control panel as "Application Preference." Any other AA mode shows up just fine as 4x and 6x.

Not sure if it's a bug in the control panel or if 2x AA is simply broken.

Edit: OK, it's definitely a control panel thing. 2xAA works just fine. Might want to look into that, Terry. :)

[Kandoko]

:jumping:
http://members.nuvox.net/~wfranks/Yes.jpg
I really hope this is the fix for the ati 2D ati2dvag driver failure under XP. It annoys the hell out of me that the card can run 3D benches forever but locksup randomly in 2d. Well its great to see they are trying to fix it:D




I only hope it works:p

[MrWho]

Hi there.

I've been away from these forums for a long while - and this is even my first time here on this section - But I came here to check the feedback on these drivers.

Thing is my GF3 TI500 is starting to show its age, and thus I just went today to order a nice cheap replacement - a Radeon 9600 Pro. It seems to me to be the best bang for the buck - even more than the (disappointing to me) GF FX 5600.

I've had this fear of ATI drivers for a long time now (even though I rarely read something bad about them nowadays), so this will be a test really. If I get to be satisfied with the card *and* the drivers, I'll get from being a nVidiot to a qualified fanATIc.

And, from what I see, it seems these drivers are going to help.

[FranckyB]

Hey Guys,

Well I seemed to be experiencing a small bug with these drivers. For some reason I can't change the Overlay values ?!

I play a video, open the overlay tab and even though the sliders are unghosted, they still can't be moved. I can select them, but every time I try to move one, it jumps back to the default position :(

This wouldn't be much of a problem was it not for the fact that I had uninstalled the 3.7 drivers before installing the new ones, and by doing so it reseted all the overlay values back to default :(

Could someone maybe tell me what registry value affect the overlay ? This way I could at least manually set it.

Thanks :)

[Sotos]

Man i noticed better Textures with certain games and these drivers :D :D

RoCKS for me until now
:D :D :D

Even if i didnt't like the 3d option in contol panel so much
You have to switch from Opengl to Direct 3d to see setting and then becomes more complicated if you want to use Costum setting
:confused:

I will test it more tommorow i am going to sleep now :p
Until now games that i tested works great and with a very nice IQ quality

[lukar]

AA2x and AA4x doesn't apply, goback to CAT 3.7 till they fix control panel for CAT 3.8

[lukar]

Actually doesn't apply when you make custom for specific application, and you save it and apply...nope
Old way works...

[Djrworth]

Where are these smartshader options for Cat 3.8? I have 9800pro

[Djrworth]

Sorry, folks, im a moron.. disregard last thread, thnx

[jolle]

Originally posted by bkswaney
well, I like them all but no freaking Overdrive on 9800 Pro's. :(

Does anyone know if Rage3d tweak works on these new drivers?

Wont be any Overdrive support for older cards then
XT series i belive..
i guess it uses some kind of temp monitoring hardware
and stuff like that, things that was added to the XT cards
and thereby wont work on 9500-9800 pro cards cause
of the lack of hardware support..

cant hack the driver to use hardware that doesnt exist..

[particleman]

I got to say Smartshader is one of the most useless features I've ever seen. When I read we were going to be able to apply pixel shader effects to old games I thought we would be able to force depth of field or emboss/bump textures. Instead all it is, is a bunch of color effects and stuff that is applied to the whole screen in post processing. Plus the profile feature you have to go to the control panel to set anyways, at least put it in the taskbar or have exe detection. All in all, Catalyst 3.8 is a big disappointment in my opinion. It is so dissappointing that I am just left baffled at what the Catalyst development team was thinking.

[Behemoth]

why the cool smartshaders only avalible in OGL? :(

[426hemi]

Some of us posted on rage 3d the issue with the additional monitor showing up in device manager with the 3.7 drivers. No problems before that release.

Problem is still there with the 3.8's and the issue isn't even recognized by ATI in the release notes. Guess those of us with the problem are frozen in time with the 3.6's.

The uninstaller works well. Thanks for that.

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by lukar
AA2x and AA4x doesn't apply, goback to CAT 3.7 till they fix control panel for CAT 3.8

As long as AA actually works, I don't give a crap what it says in the control panel.

[rellingsen]

Overall a solid release for me so far, they did a nice job. I'm thrilled that the OGL 16b color bug is gone but the worth of the smartshader is questionable IMHO.
The one thing that bugs me is the single 3D tab for OGL and D3D. It's more work getting to the advanced features in each. It bugged me so much I even sent feedback to ATI asking that they be put into separate tabs again so the advanced features are back on the front of the tab. I know I can just set it up and save the custom config. but it's just as easy to change them for each game the way the tabs were set up before. If they need an extra tab just put the 2 VPU recover settings in the "Options" tab instead of their own.

[digitalwanderer]

There's no VPU reset for the 9x/me drivers, is there. :(

[NickSpolec]

I think the Smartshader's are pretty cool.

Sure, the may be "useless", but I think they are neat, a nice little tech demo for Radeon's.

More Smartshaders!

[Rogozhin]

It's fooking great to have the smartshader when making WW2 film footage clips from IL-2 FB because you don't have to make GIFS by frame with color removed ;)

rogo