Windows Vista

[Fairlight]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 06:52:49PM -0400, Transpower may or may not have
proven themselves an utter git by pronouncing:
> This is, more or less, for John, who's hot to trot to install Vista. 
> Please make sure there is a Vista driver for your video card.  Chances 
> are, there isn't one--yet.

You have a valid point there.  Ditto for NVidia, however--their drivers
were not ready and certified in time for release for all their cards
either.

> Even on Windows XP machines, the video drivers are constantly updated. 
> On my Windows XP machine I have an ATI Radeon 7500 card--a popular card 

Five years ago, yeah.  I have a 9600XT.  It was pronounced 3yrs old a year
ago, which makes it at least four years old.  The 7500 likely predates that
by at least a year, more like 2-3 years.  Radeon is a popular line, but
you're dealing with a really, really aged card there--one that only had
64MB, I might add.  128MB was the standard when mine came out, and 256 has
been more or less the standard for the last two years--since just before I
got mine, actually.

> and one you'd think would have a very stable driver.  No such luck.  ATI 
> keeps revising it.  Why?  Because the original and many subsequent 
> versions were unstable--they would cause the computer to freeze.  The 
> current driver is working very well, finally!  But I'd be hesitant to 
> install Vista without some assurance that the new video driver would be 
> stable.

Ron, at least they're updating the drivers for XP.  ATI flat-out said
they'd not release new Catalyst versions for Win2K Pro SP4 over a year ago
when I was looking for 6.5 for it.  The XP version was out but nothing for
Win2K past 6.2.  I tried that and the performance tanked so badly in World
of Warcraft that I switched back to 5.13 within the hour that day.  Their
excuse for not releasing them for Win2K?  "Microsoft is discontinuing
Windows 2000, and it's not a gaming platform."  I pointed them at the
article on MS's web site that flat-out said that while it was in secondary
support, it was NOT being dropped, and would be supported through 2010.
I saw figures a month or less ago that said 17% of the market still runs
Win2K.  And strangely, not much until the last 6 months have I seen games
labelled XP-only.  Almost every game coming out is still 2000/XP and now
tacks on Vista.  Prey was -extremely- taxing (a modified Doom3 engine), and
it was 2K/XP supported.  ATI should really actually look at the market for
which they're developing before making such assinine and sweeping
statements to a customer--but they didn't.

ATI pulled and Adaptec Maneuver on me, and I'll never buy another ATI
product if I have a say in it.  NVidia is still making Win2K drivers, so
I'll go and stick with them from now on (my laptop has an NVidia Go 6150
and outperforms the Radeon 9200--***in a LAPTOP***...).

As for the rationale behind the new Catalyst releases, you can place the
blame mostly on the gaming industry.  They continually push the DirectX
API and thereby the cards to the limit, and the patches are meant to fix
bugs that only appear in field use, discovered outside the labs, under
certain environments and applications.  They also keep trying to optimise
the driver performance, but 70%+ of every Catalyst release notes file I've
ever read has been dedicated specific game-related fixes.

In theory, yes, the driver should support every function of the card in
every conceivable configuration.  But there's a lot that can go wrong
between the BIOS, the bus, the card itself, the HAL, the driver, and the
application.  That's what, six levels of abstraction, and I may have
omitted one.  That's plenty of fertile ground in which to find growing bugs
that don't creep up until that next great game pushes the envelope just a
bit further.  A good percentage of bug fixes are configuration-specific,
meant to give it the widest proper functionality under the broadest
possible set of configurations.  All it takes is one flaky chipset.  My
system has -always- BSOD'd on Diablo 2, and to this day neither Blizzard,
MS, nor ATI has addressed it--they all pass the buck.  Nevermind that the
game is like 7 years old now and I run far more taxing things than that
with no issue (it's the only game that ever BSOD'd me besides Oblivion, and
I fixed the latter with a configuration change--lower the acceleration rate
on the AC97 sound--known issue).  I can trace the bug in Diablo 2 straight
to the video and cannot get a fix for it--and can't run it on a system that
far outstrips the P2-400MHz no-name with a SiS-based card on which the game
ran just fine.  A fact which pisses me off to no end, as I'm a fan of the
series, dated as it is.

But back to the drivers...

Further confusing things are multiple releases of the same drivers--but not
the same.  For instance, there are "Omega" drivers released by an (ex?) ATI
employee or something, often touted as more stable than ATI's own drivers.
He did keep releasing Win2K, but I won't use those drivers because they're
not officially supported.  Not that official support got me more than
"tough, deal with it" from ATI.  But I don't need to change a known
quantity at this point.  There are a few more incarnations of ATI drivers
out there...at least one I know of, I think several.  Based on ATI's code,
but modified as whomever felt was necessary.

Honestly, you're not going to be much better off with NVidia on the
certified driver issue with Vista.  However, you'll be better off in the
long run by getting NVidia.  If ATI didn't support Win2K until EOL, I have
zero expectation that they'll do anything differently with XP in a few
years.

mark->