Catalyst 8.3s - Better or worse?

I switched to 8.3 3 days ago. I'm running a 3870 on XP SP2. The performance seems to be the same.

Hm, might have to try again

load them 2 times

i think the triple and quad crossfire is giving amd another headache

All those promises DAAMIT....

Driver Deja-moo?

A feeling you've heard the same bullshit before?

I felt like my crysis framerates were cut in half, which means I lost about 10-15FPS  

I just wiped XP and installed vista 32-bit so I will see if they are any better now. I have had issues with every 8.x XP driver so far, from artifacts to BSODs.

Try nVidia's drivers with your ATi card.... they dont call them Forceware for nothing.

lol i wish i had something funny to add

i have a 3850+vista 64 and i haven't noticed any difference in performance

nice to see AMD delivering once again on those updated drivers.

Hmmmm maybe 8.4 will be what all the ATi owners are waiting for ...

But dont hold your breathe.

I do find ATI is hit and miss... have been for years. I had an All-In-Wonder card a while back... every second update would kill it's ability to watch TV on the computer... which is the whole point of having that card. I currently have a 2600 pro and with two monitors the thing would crash occasionally. ATI didn't have a clue how to fix it... though some users found some ideas that helped. I have never used nVidia before... so not sure if they are any better. That I leave up to the others who know more about them. Though in the future I want to upgrade to 8800's (probably GTS because dual slot)... mainly because my editing program (Premier Pro and After Effects) generally just works better on nVidia for some reason. Plus, the 2600 pro is noisy... loudest part of my machine.

I had 8.3 from the date of release and i like it. It seems a little more stable and my 3dmark is at a new high 16,200+, was around 100 to 200 points less so its not much better really. I havent had a "driver stopped working and recovered" error since install even with a higher overclock. But like previous Catalyst drivers its an odd number (.3, .5, .7 kinda thing) so i cant play BF2142. Dont ask, i find it funny myself, all last summer i could only install the even numbered ones if i was planning on playing that game. i havent played it in a while but a few days ago i went to play and it wont load, just like before.
LOL i just read the above post. So its not just me with every other release problems!

Had the same problem. I reverted to 8.2 and all is well.

The main game I play is TF2 and I have yet to notice any performance drops in it. Still average around 150-200FPS sometimes a bit lower depending on the map.



Same. Are you running Vista? Cuz I used to have that problem with the driver would stop working too but it has stopped since 8.3. Have yet to try 3DMark06 again. My top was 12320 with a 800MHz GPU 2200MHz Memory on a HD2900Pro 1GB. Might try again and see what happens.

They make the cards and they don't even know how to use them. Pathetic. I feel very disheartened and embittered.

Year after year of the same bullshit.

Agreed, everything should perform straight out of the box.

So much angst for ATI. Bunch of blubbering vaginas, the lot of you =P

Really, this is the first issue I can recall having with an ATI driver. ATI stuff always ran just peachy for me until the 8.3 Cats. Nice to see the gamut of responses running from worse to same to better about them... a big help   Thanks everyone, though, honestly.

Ha! Blotch, I had the same issue. I was all geared up for the once in a blue moon scenario where ALL of my buddies were free to meet up for an evening of 2142. I even installed 8.3 in honor of the evening.

As you could predict, I only got in a total of about 15 minutes of gametime (of a losing Titan round no less!) because 2142 wouldn't run, so I had to uninstall 8.3, then install 8.2, then uninstall and reinstall 2142, 1.4 patch, Northern Strike, 1.4 patch again, Punkbuster update.... Needless to say, I was pretty annoyed at ATI at that point.

2142, BF2, Crysis, etc., seem to run well on 8.2 again. But now I am getting intermittent (i.e., every half hour) flickering on my 2 monitors where everything freezes for a second and a half or so while my screen flickers. Ever seen anything like that?

Do you all recommend uninstalling the previous version BEFORE installing the next version? Could that be part of the issue? Some products do that automatically when you install the new version. Others don't, and then become more and more unstable. Shouldn't it be standard procedure that an app should first unstall its previous version, since statistically most users will be upgrading from a previous version?

Sorry for the rant, but I would love to hear everyone's thoughts/experiences...

I always use the ATI Software removal tool (under add/remove programs) before installing the next drivers. I have 8.3 for my 2900XT, and they seemed to work fine for M2TW and Oblivion. 3D Mark 06 score was the same too, near 10K.

As my previous post implies I am feeling very bitter about my upcoming video card decision and purchase.

It is finally starting to dawn on me how ludicrous it is to drop $500.00+ dollars on one computer component to play some pew-pew video games. I'm still going to do it, but I really don't feel that excited about it anymore.

I was on the cusp of purchasing the X2, but now that the 8.3 drivers were (once again) not as expected, I will wait for the top-end 9800 series cards to become available.

I feel your pain Kataklyzm. I like the idea of ATI and all, but I am getting annoyed. I have had a bad experience with my HIS 3870. And it occurred to me: ATI technology may be good (or even superior?), but 1) NVidia has the better vendors, where as ATI has a few decent ones (Sapphire? Diamond? Visiontek?), and a bunch of crappy ones (the rest); and 2) there always seems to be the need to apologize for ATI drivers ("they are good, EXCEPT for..." or "this version didn't do it, but maybe the next version they will REALLY get the drivers optimized and kick NVidia's ass").

It figures that I bought a P35 Crossfire board that I quite like (MSI Neo2), but I am tempted more than ever just to forfeit the opportunity to Crossfire and just buy an 8800GT/GTS.

should i upgrade my catalyst too? from 7.11 to 8.3?
with my 2600pro OCed 745/1150

I went from 17000 to 14500 with 8.3 from 8.1 i went back

Wow. Just not sure why everyone is having all of these problems. I think it might be OS related. Most of the ones having problems(well those that are listed anyways) show Windows XP.

Oh well. Hopefully Cat 8.4 comes out and fixes the stuff you guys are having problems whit. Sorry you have to deal with it though.

Wow. Just not sure why everyone is having all of these problems. I think it might be OS related. Most of the ones having problems(well those that are listed anyways) show Windows XP.

Oh well. Hopefully Cat 8.4 comes out and fixes the stuff you guys are having problems whit. Sorry you have to deal with it though.

then ill use 7.11 until 8.4 comes out. i dont want to deal with that stupid driver problems

i think the 8.3s made my performance a lot worse for my hd3870

I am with jhyukkang, but why do we perpetually keep having to hope that the NEXT driver version will FINALLY solve our issues? Pretty frustrating.

I just tried 8.3 for vista and it fixed some bugs that the XP drivers had, and introduced others. Rather than having a few blue trees in crysis, I now have a green strip at the top of the screen when I look up. Adjusting my CRT monitor so that I cut off the top few pixels negates this effect.

Oh, and I still see ripples in the water through mountains and cliffs, but I think that was something added in the 1.1 patch, not driver related.

The green striipe is nothing more than TWIMTBP, ignore them, as theyre almost out of the picture heheh

What about the moon that floats in the trees, instead of in the sky?

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1327/9/ati_catalyst_8...

8.3 works fine for me.

When changing drivers uninstal, driver cleaner, then reinstall always seems to work no problems on my PC.

8.3 were terrible for my 3870x2. From what I have read only xp users with this card are having the significant decrease in performance that I am having with this card. I have submitted my issues on this with ATI .

Yup that seems right. The 3870X2's have a big hit in XP. Its weird.

8.3 fixed windowed mode for WoW on my 3850 under XP Pro SP2. Previously I couldn't set multisampling over 1X or the game would lag any time I'd move the mouse over the task bar, etc. Now it runs smoothly when set to 2X or 4X.

Does anybody know the performance of this drivers on an older agp card? (i'm thinking of the X800 XT Fellas   ) 'cause i remember reading on the WoW forums that AGP users should be using something like Cat7.6 and that everything after that just went donwhill for agp users performance and stability-wise. I've been updating my drivers with no issues, but want to know if i'm getting top performance out of my system

Thanks!

They stopped performance enhancements for your card at around cat 5.10   Anything Up to 7.7 should be ok, but 7.8/7.9 are the real dodgy ones.

So that means that performance has actualy declined for me since Cat 7.7?

Not that but that there has not been any enhancements for AGP type cards. Doesn't mean though that a newer driver wont help your card run something faster. Sometimes the enhancements are for the driver for that game and will help any card. But I have 8.2 on my X850XT(in my old system) and I never noticed the performance drop. It still plays HL2 @ 1280x1024 with everything possible maxxed including AA and AF without a hitch.

BTW, nive avitar. Locke form FF3/6 right?

yeah  

Well, the thing is that i changed monitors, i used to play on a 17" CRT at 1152x864 and 1280x1024, and now i'm on a 20" Widescreen LCD @ 1680x1050 Screen Resolution. Needles to say, I've taken a performance drop just for running at native resolution, but it just mantained playabilty. that's half the reason to ask 'bout the preformance of the drivers.

Thanks!

PS: I found the image of locke and used it 'cause one of may favorite FF1 chars is precisely a Thief LOL

went from 8.1 to 8.3, a definete performance increase noticed by naked eye.

22" LCD 1680x1050, only performance increase noticed was Crysis. Rest all felt pretty much the same.

3870 - XP SP2 - I saw no difference at all except aspect ratio (FINALLY) fixed for the games I tested.

Well I updated to Vista SP1, Crysis patch 1.2 and looked at a Cat 8.3 review showing an increase in FPS for Crysis. So I decided to go and try this by upping 2 of the settings I had on high to very high thus giving me almost all on very high, some on high and shadows on medium.

Started the game from the beginning, only reason I used Crysis is cuz its very demanding, and everything was nice and smooth. Even when I hit the harbor battle in the beginning which used to be a bit choppy had no stuttering and then at the harbor itself I used to get lagged when the enemy would flood on screen but no more.

So far Cat 8.3 is awesome. Well on Vista it is, Along with Vista SP1.

Vista 32---

I noticed a 200 point drop in 3dmark scores going from 8.1 to 8.3, but games felt the same. I'm a bit ashamed, but I have had Crysis for over a month and haven't played it yet. But the benchies were the same.

My system was stable before 8.3, and is still stable. SP1 didn't give me any noticeable improvements.

My ATI rule of thumb: Read the changelog and don't upgrade unless there is a fix/improvement to your games, or it fixes and issue you must have.

I like having options, so it's nice that AMD/ATI keeps popping out drivers. If they don't improve something, I don't install them.

Well i have a e6420 oced to 3.2ghz, HD2900Pro OCed to XT, i used to get 13,000 on 3dmark06 during the 7.9 cat, I have been gone for awhile so i have reformated, but now i get 10,000 on 3dmark06. I have the new 8.3 cat, i havent tried the old ones again, but nothing has changed on this computer except for the cat. =/

Well the only way Cat lowers 3DMark scores is in XP, which sucks since most gamers use it. I have Vista and mine is the same as Cat 8.2/8.2. And it truly does give a 15-20% performance boost in Crysis for 8.3. I played it again and upped some of the settings to very high that I had on high so now most are very high and it ran much smoother at the points that used to get a bit laggy, i.e. the begining of the area you have to blow up the AA's and the ship area.

I just hope they get the other drivers out with a fix for the XP system. Would be nice to see everything improve on the R660/670 ships before the R770 comes out that way we can make our hardware last until then.

Once RV770 comes out they will drop RV670 support. Such a shame.

They still support the 9xxx series. So, I doubt that.

No no, I mean real support. As in performance optimisations etc. They don't do that for the X1000 series anymore, they'll probably drop R600 support when RV770 comes out and maybe RV670, but it will probably last for a little while after.

Seems only better than Crossfire for 3870 x 2 coz of the new feature Crossfire X. I found catalyst 8.3 is even poorer performance for my 3870 in Windows xp system while there was with satified performance when use Catalyst 8.2.