Catalyst 8.1 released

I've got CCC 8.1 but seeing as I only have an x300 in at the moment I can't play any games so it doesn't make a difference. I'm also nowhere near any of my other pc's with decent cards in.

As I'm getting a 3870 at the end of the month I would like to see if theres any improvements.

Installed them yesterday, no XF, but went 20 times more smoothly than the 7.12 ones. Support for Hybrid XF etc.

Anyways, I saw no real performance improvement over 7.12 appart from the install process.

Thats a plus in itself though. My install didnt go 100% smoothly with 7.12, any 3dmark wont run without command line tweaking to stop the system scan, but then again i dont get any results after its finished that way, plus everytime windows starts i get a found new hardware message concerning my video card. Blah! Games ran fine though, but id like to get some 3dmark06 results to compare with my old 7900gt.

----------------------------#To anyone with a 2900pro#---------------------------

at stock speeds, what score do you get in 3dmark06 ? (sm2 & sm3 scores i mean) @1152x864 my overclocked gt got just over 3000 for each one. (I know I could check the launch benchmarks but Id like to know what kinda score it gets with modern drivers) know its a hell of alot faster, i just dont have any figures just my own impressions. For a start sm2 test 1 has a minimum frame rate of 19 versus 11 for my gt, in a real game, my absolute minimum in STALKER (i used a save at a point where ive never seen the game chug soo bad) i got like 5 frames better with the grass and shadow sliders at full, compared to the same save on the gt with the sliders about 3/4 the way up. I know its not great these days as far as cards go but considering its about 25% faster all round as far as minimum frame are concerned (at LEAST 50% in crysis woot!) at 100mhz less core and 50mhz less memory speeds, I am thoroughly impressed.

Also the 8.1 crysis hotfix boosts crossfire performance a bit:

http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=226648

+20% dx10 very high

Try this :http://www.futuremark.com/download/hotfix_oct07/

Might help.

I haven't really read up on this yet but does anyone know if it fixes the not being able to control the fan issue?

I'd like to know that too. That is an incredible oversight.

Well in my short time of using my card I went into ati tool and could only do it in increments of 1/3, so that was 33% 66% and 100%. That was with catalyst 7.12. 66% was surprisingly loud and 100%, well the less said about that the better lol. There must be someway of doing it in smaller increments cos 50% might be a good compromise between cooling and noise. I thought about disconnecting the fan from the card and running it through a speed controller that came with my old zalman vf700 gpu cooler. That way I could tune it to whatever I want.

Cheers for that

the fans control is my biggest headache with the 3870.

Lets Hope that this will mark the end of poor drivers limiting the power of the powerful GPU's. More efficient use can make an incredible difference on the overall performance of cards.


To those who think that the cards that you have are already so powerful that you do not need to upgrade, think again. These drivers make as much of a difference as a generation of GPU technology.

id say the difference between catalyst 7.4 (r600 launch driver) and now at 8.1 (assuming its a fraction better all round than 7.12 and not worse) you might have a case to say thats worth alot of extra core and memory speed.

well, I just tried them. and assuming I'm not incompetent they did not work we'll. HUGE corruption and sub x300 performance. not sure what happened there, might try agan after omega releases his version, but till then it's back to 7.12.

Ouch thats not good lol. What card is that with? There are some hot fixes that go with this apparently.

Updated from 7.12 to 8.1 yesterday. I'm running an X1900XTX. So far no complications what so ever. Everything is running smooth and quick. Install worked without any issues.

I'm running Vista-32bit by the way.

With the 8.1 my 2900pro in staker has increased from the settings I set it at (will check settings when I get home).I'm still using XP.

 
I'm still using my old Athlon 2500+M (2400Mhz) 2GB Ram, with an AGP ATI X1950Pro. Since the 7.7> the drivers for us AGP users have been screwed. Has anyone tried these new drivers with the AGP Hot fix?
I don't feel like uninstalling and rebooting 4x if it doesn't work again....

Thx....
 

I had a problem like this. It was corrected by downloading the driver from my GPU manufacturer. It had to do with the HDMI audio. Of course I had to change my sound back to my on-board audio to get it through the speakers, but it got rid of the "unknown device".

Well I can say I'm not happy with the new Cats. 8.1 for some reason took my motherboard from 2 PCIE 2.0 slots down to 1 PCIE2.0 and 1 PCIE1.0 and it droped my 3dm scores over 2g. Went back to 7.12 and both my PCIE slots are running full speed, and my 3DM scores jumped back up. Could the the new southbridge driver that installed with the 8.1's I'll try upgrading it again but without the new southbridge drivers and see how that goes.

**UPDATE**
Tried the above mentioned install and still no go. I can't even pull up the CCC in 8.1. I have tried both an "upgrade" of the cats, as well as from a fresh install. (I have a ghost image of my system from Monday that is fully up to date with all updates and such.) It only takes me a few minutes to have a nice fresh pristine install of windows to do testing with. 8.1 don't work for me really at all. HOT TO HAPPY ABOUT THAT. Back to 7.12 for me.

O.k this is my FM scores http://service.futuremark.com/orb/resultanalyzer.jsp?pr... .This is without the hotfix,before my score was 81++.So this new driver is working well for me.Will be back with hotfix results

And now here is my hotfix scroe. http://service.futuremark.com/orb/resultanalyzer.jsp?pr... .I like this 2900pro,maybe I will over clock it and see what happens.

Way to go ATI. 3Dmark went up 77 points. Its a start right!! 15000

Everything installed perfectly for me except the display driver... no clue why. I uninstalled the old 7.12 drivers and everything. Did driver cleaner pro..... disabled crossfire/enabled it. The Display drivers just wont install, But other than that everything installed perfectly.

Anyone who is having issues, do the age old fix of installing the drivers in safe mode pointing to the folder where the drivers are, it fixes 9/10 ATI driver problems for me.

Thanks for posting you 2900pro score! interesting for me as i have a pro but 3dmark06 wont work. Someone already posted how to get it going, but i wont be able to test for a while as im far far away from my pc. What resolution was that at please? and what were your sm2 and sm3 scores please?

Cheers!

Will give it a shot, cheers for that!

I ''think'' I got a 3-5 FPS boost on the crysis demo with my 3850. It seems to be running faster. 8.1 seems stable although Jedi Academy still crashes.

Sorry my mistake thought you had just linked to a picture not the actual results screen. Yes, i am very stupid i know lol.

Thats kool.Are these the drivers for Q-crossfireX

Na I think there coming later in this quarter, like february I think i heard, these are the ones for the 3870 x2, so you could consider these ati's best effort at all round (normal 2 card/gpu) crossfire scaling up to now.

Your pro is at stock speeds yeah?

cheers

Yep,will possiblly oc it tonight.

These drivers appear to be more efficient with Vista 32, my Ram usage dropped while rendering a complex 3d scene in opengl on an X1950Pro.

I installed these last night and was able to use riviatuner on both cards in my 3870 crossfire setup. I ran 3dmark06 and my score went from 15,803 to 16,025. I ran 3dmark before I adjusted fans to get a apples to apples comparison. One thing I did notice last night while running a prime95 load test is when the screen saver tried it kick on it hung. Not sure if this had anything to do with the driver but the screen saver was able to start in previous load tests.

I have an 5000+ BE with an Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe, it has the 790FX chipset. I have an MSI HD3850 OC video card. The 7.12 install went fine. The 8.1 seems to have a problem after install. The control center refuses to come up stating that it has encountered a problem. Yes I have all the .Net installs. Yes I ran Driver Cleaner. The system seems OK but something about the install didn't go correctly I'm going to try some benchmarks to get a look at functionality. But I am thinking I will go back to the last fully functional driver group.

I tried updating to these on my sapphire 3850 512Mb and they aren't completely working with vista32, and i cleaned out all old ati drivers.

first off the ati install manager wont run most of the time, vista just tells me that the program has stopped working.

then when i finally somehow got it to work(not sure what exactly made it work), catalyst control center(including the part that runs in the background) won't work. whenever it tries to load i get a message saying that the registry can't be modified(i am logged on as an administrator) then another message saying that CLI blah blah can't load

any ideas on what could be going on.

There is a bug in those 8.1 drivers. A white dot appears on the upper left corner of the screen as long as the CCC is active. It's only on the background, but quite annoying.

Confirmed! White dot bug is also present on my system. It's a little white square in the top left corner of my display. It does disappear if you deactivate the CCC. Weird!

I also have the white dot.

These are performance enhancing dots.

No fair I don't have any white dots!

WAIT!!! I tried stabbing my lcd monitor with some scissors and got the white dots but the performance is the same! Please help me! How do I get rid of the dots???

I too have this white dot in the upper left corner.Oc 2900pro to748/950 using riva. http://service.futuremark.com/orb/resultanalyzer.jsp?pr... .this is with the new 8.1 and hotfix