9050 Discussion?

[Da NoMx!]

did i miss it or didn't it even exist?
anyway..... i just grabbed them - and now i'm a little suspicious if to install them or not - newer isnt always = better -> so..... did anyone experienced anything special with em?

or are there nearly zero changes made?
( i hope at least MotoGP is going to work propperly ( as it did before ) ) ;

*BoinG*

[Athlon-pv]

gonna install them today , i wanna play games under 98, so far this hasnt been the case under 9044 for me.

Regards,

pv

[WimpMiester]

Well, installing the 9050 driver was a real nightmare.

I ran the setup and everything looked good until it was done and then gave an error message saying the video adapter couldn't be configured. So I went back to the 9044 driver and got the same message. So I tried the official Catalyst release and the same thing. When I reset the system my monitor went dead so I had to go to safe mode. I removed the adapter then rebooted and still no display. Went back to safe mode and ran the setup for the Official Catalyst driver. Seemed to work so I rebooted again and still no screen so back to safe mode. Removed the adapter and rebooted. Finally the display didn't disappear and windows detected my Radeon 7200 but I canceled the driver install and continued to the desktop. Went into device manager and tried updating the driver that way with the 9050 again and it took it that time. Rebooted everything was OK so I tried the 9050 setup again. This time it wanted a file called "RUS" which I assume is the Russian language file so I skipped it and guess what, the same error accrued again. So I had to repeat everything I stated earlier to get my display back again. Since it took the 9050 driver once I tried it again using the same steps but didn't run the setup after installing from the device manager. Now that they are installed everything seems OK but no improvement from the last beta that I could see. The new Control Panel has settings for Anisotropic filtering, Application Preference and 16x. The last time I had an install problem like this was with a beta driver for the Rage 128 years ago.

I'm not complaining but just warning people there is something fishy with the setup in this release.

[Imagoon4935]

installation for me wasn't all that different from any other drivers i've installed.

the only big difference i can see is an anisotropic filtering setting in the console for my radeon 64

[GGP]

Installed the 9050 on my machine yesterday. Everything went fine, no probs at all. I never run the setup.exe, always install it manually and that worked fine. Same is true for the new CPanel. I also didn't get this inf error that I got with older versions including the newest Omegas.
However, I didn't see any improvement over the preceding releases but also no new bugs.

GGP

[nikita]

Interesting, thanks all for posting...it makes me wonder if I should just wait for the official update
So many new leaks and noone knows/sees the actual improvement ?

[Ostsol]

I haven't had any problems installing this or any previous driver. I've had trouble uninstalling some pre-Catalyst drivers, but I haven't had that problem recently. I don't notice any particular difference between this driver set and the last. Table fog is still screwed up in Morrowind.

[kbleft]

Originally posted by nikita
Interesting, thanks all for posting...it makes me wonder if I should just wait for the official update
So many new leaks and noone knows/sees the actual improvement ?

I have seen openGL performance steadily get smoother. Maybe not faster, exactly, but definitely smoother. Remember, the official catalysts already had D3D optimizations. ATi was still working on OGL. Also note that the D3D optimizations in the official cats did not affect many of the newer systems. Their greatest effect was on the older systems where games and framerates were noticeably smoother. The faster systems were already tweaked out.


So these leaks seem to be a steady stream of trial and error optimizations aimed at improving the experience on the lower-class systems. Major bug fixes may creep in, but most of the bugs reported now are pretty minor: AvP2 textures, Descent3 cracked sky, etc. So it isn't likely that ATi is going to include all of those fixes in a driver that gets leaked. They are probably strewn throughout several revisions that are only in-house. Hopefully they will all come out in the end.

[nikita]

Cool, thanks Kbleft

[jjjayb]

Installed them yesterday without any problems. Everything looks great so far. Rtcw runs great and looks wonderful. Even the forest level runs beautifully. Used to get 15fps with 9031's, getting 40-50 fps with 9050's on the start of the forest level. Soldier of fortune 2 runs very smoothly and looks better than it ever has. Could be because of the patch they released today though. Army operations runs great also. Haven't really tried anything else yet. So far I am really pleased with them. I'll report back if I find any problems.

[kbleft]

Originally posted by jjjayb
Installed them yesterday without any problems. Everything looks great so far. Rtcw runs great and looks wonderful. Even the forest level runs beautifully. Used to get 15fps with 9031's, getting 40-50 fps with 9050's on the start of the forest level. Soldier of fortune 2 runs very smoothly and looks better than it ever has. Could be because of the patch they released today though. Army operations runs great also. Haven't really tried anything else yet. So far I am really pleased with them. I'll report back if I find any problems.

SoF2 released a patch? Or are you talking about ATi's SOF2 patch?

[Da NoMx!]

i gave em a try - everything went fine
but from time to time i get some strange ATI****.dll errors - they even appear while using internet explorer ..... strange strange....

[jjjayb]

Raven released a patch for sof2. get it here: http://www.filefront.com/?skin=121&f...2-101patch.exe

[Camster]

I installed them today. They seem okay. OPengl seems smoother and perhaps a little faster. Direct 3d is about the same. Also 2d seems sharper but thats a personal preference thing too.

Moto GP Demo is a little slower for me on these though.

[Dyre Straits]

I've had little to no trouble moving from one driver to another for nearly a year now. Guess it was my time for trouble.
Anyway, I got error upon error.
BUT, there were some other problems starting up on my system, so, I got a new HD on Wednesday and installed a completely fresh Win98SE.
I started out with the official sets from ATi and then migrated up to 9050. Everything is as good or better than ever now.
I'm completely in awe of how Morrowind is running now.

Dyre Straits

[Camster]

ATI are really showing a commitment to their drivers. I am impressed with their effort. I have had my 8500 Retail for about 2 months now and I am loving it more and more each day. The IQ is simply breathtaking on games like Serious Sam, RTCW or JKII where the card is doing what its capable of. On a kind of funny note I completely bollockeds the first install of the 9050. I've got so damn many driver sets on my PC that I installed the wrong Control Applet and said "No" to keeping the newer driver files. Doh!! Anyways I uninstalled them all and flushed the Registry and started again and all was fine. I can't blame ATI for my being a Dufuss. LOL. Its often said that the biggest PC problems occur between the monitor and the chair. So true!

[DekerAdrenaline]

9050 run´s fine here....
SOF2 is runnig fast...and with best graphics..

[GAGFAX]

Can someone post a working link to download the 9050 leaks for 98se, i want to see if they make flashpoint any better.

[nikita]

http://www.driverheaven.net/thread.php?id=2752

[Sherv]

Originally posted by Camster
I installed them today. They seem okay. OPengl seems smoother and perhaps a little faster. Direct 3d is about the same. Also 2d seems sharper but thats a personal preference thing too.

I would agree on all that but Tony Hawks 3, Colin Macrae 2 and AVP2 all seem to be running faster now in direct3d, espessially THPS3. (snow level @60fps avg!!) UT is also running about 10-15fps faster with these compared to the 9031 and Omegadrives latest set based on the 9044. Liandri deathmatch avg @95fps, facing worlds map avg @110fps!! with S3 texture compession.

Everything up to the max, AF 16X, v-sync off @1024*768, 32-bit.

AMD T-Bird 1.4Ghz
256mb DDR
ATI Radeon 64mb ddr vivo retail
Gigabyte 7DXR mainboard
9050 driver set