3.10 ATI Radeon Driver?

For those adventurous types:

http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4291.html

While it doesn't specificly mention Second Life, there are some OpenGL issues supposedly addressed in this version. No WHQL certification, use at your own risk yadda yadda. I'm going to see what this does just for fun.

What exactly was that link supposed to be? All I see is a hotfix for the Call of Duty game, nothing about 3.10 drivers...

You can get all past drivers back to like 2.6 from ATI's web site. When you to download the lastest driver just look towards the bottom of the page for a "Past Drivers" link.

FYI. I have a 8500 and experienced many of the problems other ATI people are having. I went back to the 3.1 drivers. Made things worse. I went from crashing back to the desktop to complete system hangs. Not to mention 3.1 screws with many of the other game I like to play. Like HomeWorld 2.

Went back to 3.9.. It crashes alot but it's bearable.

The Call of Duty fix is essentially a beta version of the 3.10 drivers which address some OpenGL problems which MIGHT be similar to the problems we're seeing in Second Life.

I tried them briefly last night and they seemed to work OK and didn't crash but it was getting late so I didn't get a chance to really try them out. If you feel up to it, they aren't WHQL certified by Microsoft (Not really sure that even MEANS anything though since I've had some WHQL "certified" drivers which were quite crappy!) but the download should be available at that URL.

The Past Drivers link was not the one I was referring to. The file I'm referring to IS the "HotFix" which appears to be a complete full driver kit.

Wow! Someone please reply to this, I really wanna know if ATI fixed something here.

I really dont want to go through the hassle of completely re-doing the driver setup I have on my SL-computer, which is a laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9k, unless its really worth it.

I don't know if a fix for one single game will be a fix for Second Life. Remember that all this stuff is streaming, so the graphics are streaming, the engine isn't really similar to anything else, it's just different.

However if that fix really worked, I guess we have a game we can compare SL's graphics engine to!

All games talk to the drivers. If they fixed something in the drivers for one game it can often fix it for others (or break it..)

BUMP

Well since this was bumped, I think I will add my two cents again and tell you the status of my system. I am using a ATi 9700 Pro with 3.9 Drivers. When I first started playing WAAAAY back in ver 1.1.6 ( ), my system would crash every 5 minutes. I first tried all the different cobination of settings and such, and worked my way through the Hardware and my system's BIOS settings to no avail. I ran the problem down to being drivers and power supply (running a 250W... yeah I know..). So I went online and bought a 600W and decided to get some memory also (only 256MB... yeah I know... ). My memory came in first... so I tried it out. Now that I am running 768MB of memory, everything works fine (exception: crashes on exit and no AGP). Now I still need the 600W so I can actually plug my CD-ROM drives in, but as far as vid card and driver combo, I no longer crash.

I find that on ATI cards the display is a LOT more jerky than on my wifes GeForce 3 system.

My system:
Gigabyte 8KNXP P4 2.8C, gig of RAM, Radeon 9700 Pro 120

Her System:
Asus A7N8X, AMD 2600+, gig of RAM, GeForce 3 (non-Ti)

I truely hope Linden works closely with BOTH nVidia >>AND<< ATI to get things to work smooth, the difference was night and day and I strongly believe it's because of their close relationship with nVidia and a lack of testing/optimizations on the ATI side.

Are there any performance increses/stability fixes with the 3.10 betas (in SL)?

*bump*

Okay, I know this has been beat to death. I am pretty sure all that can be done right now has been done. I do have a few questions though:

1) Can someone describe the crashes that occur most often due to the ATI cards? The problem that I was having with power and memory issues (that would cause a hard crash) have been resolved. Now I am getting software crashes where newview.exe fails and generates a logfile. Is this what most people have been seeing or do I have another problem?

2) Can someone answer Chris Omega's questions?

Has anyone tried them yet?

rofl.

All the ATI users are too afraid to try the new drivers...

Well, I have tried all of them, no effect what so ever. I was still crashing every 5 to 20 minutes. I am just afraid that it may be something else. I have the wonderful combo of ATI vid card, AMD cpu, and VIA chipset, which I hear doesn't get along with SL at all. Funny thing is, out of desperation I increased the graphics levels (Local lighting, bumpmapping, detail levels, etc.) to find that it now crashes every hour+ or so with the only downside being low fps. I don't understand...

Yes newview.exe is my most comon error message with my radeon card second is accelerateor driver not responding ,and then just freeze up when i am in appearance or opening textrures while in apearance. but i will say that i hope to have no more trouble i was ussing the 3.8 and 3 days ago i tried the 3.9 .I became so fed up with my card i went on to price watch and bought fx 5900. I am praying i will have no wrries from now on i will let you know might be what we all come too!