Latest drivers for 9800pro

[?uzzled]

I have a 128MB Sapphire 9800pro. I've been using the cat 3.7 for years now.
Although its stable, the performance is lacking for newer games.

Today I tried the Omega 6.5 drivers. Benching Doom3 I gained an extra 9fps
and 3dmark03 I gained 300 points. However I found the text in Windows not as
sharp as the cat 3.7 and so I had to uninstall it.

I then tried the cat 6.5 (drivers only, didn't want CCC) from
www.sapphiretech.com. Benching was only 1 - 2 fps off the omega drivers and
the text was sharp again. However I found some video clips play back in what
I would describe as negative colour.

Questions:

1) Why is 2d text not as sharp with Omega drivers ? (It seems to be the
omega drivers since going back to the cat drivers, the text is fine again).

2) Why would cat 6.5 drivers cause video corruption ? Anybody else getting
this ?

3) Should I try the ATI cat instead of the Sapphire one ?

4) Is it worth installing any of the cat 6.x drivers for a 9800pro ? Maybe I
should stick with 5.x or even 4.x ? Recommendations ?

Thanks for any replies.

 

[First of One]

1) Why is 2d text not as sharp with Omega drivers ? (It seems to be the
omega drivers since going back to the cat drivers, the text is fine
again).

No idea. Maybe the Omega drivers slightly alter the monitor timings,
necessitating moire adjustment on your monitor to bring the text focus back
to original levels.

2) Why would cat 6.5 drivers cause video corruption ? Anybody else getting
this ?

By "corruption", you mean a psychedellic palette of pink and neon green? It
should only appear in WMVs, because ATi drivers now do WMV hardware
acceleration. To correct the colors, deselect "video mixing renderer" (or
"VMR" for short) from your movie player app.

3) Should I try the ATI cat instead of the Sapphire one ?

Neg. All Sapphire does is slap its logo on top of ATi's control panel, if
that. The driver files should be identical.

4) Is it worth installing any of the cat 6.x drivers for a 9800pro ? Maybe
I should stick with 5.x or even 4.x ? Recommendations ?

The 9 fps increase you saw in Doom 3 was introduced fairly recently, I
believe, around v5.11. Might as well use the latest 6.5 drivers.

 

[?uzzled]

No idea. Maybe the Omega drivers slightly alter the monitor timings,
necessitating moire adjustment on your monitor to bring the text focus
back to original levels.

I pressed the auto button on my monitor a few times but it wasn't really
helping much. It just shifted the fuzziness to a different part of the
screen. The orginal cat drivers were removed and then I ran the cat
uninstaller from the ATI website as well.

By "corruption", you mean a psychedellic palette of pink and neon green?
It should only appear in WMVs, because ATi drivers now do WMV hardware
acceleration. To correct the colors, deselect "video mixing renderer" (or
"VMR" for short) from your movie player app.

Yep that was the problem. I turned it off in MP9 and the videos are playing
again. Many thanks for that. Not sure how I would have found that without
asking in here.

Neg. All Sapphire does is slap its logo on top of ATi's control panel, if
that. The driver files should be identical.


The 9 fps increase you saw in Doom 3 was introduced fairly recently, I
believe, around v5.11. Might as well use the latest 6.5 drivers.

Many thanks for your help with resolving the video problem. Now that its
working, I'm able to use the cat 6.5 again. I re-installed the control panel
from the cat 3.7 and that's working with it as well.

I guess this will be the last cat upgrade needed for the 9x00 cards. Surely
newer cats are only optomised for the newer cards now. Any point in updating
the drivers in the future ?

Thanks again.

 

[First of One]

I pressed the auto button on my monitor a few times but it wasn't really
helping much. It just shifted the fuzziness to a different part of the
screen. The orginal cat drivers were removed and then I ran the cat
uninstaller from the ATI website as well.

The "auto" button is fairly useless, since the monitor can't look at itself
from the outside. You need to manually adjust the H and V moire controls
while displaying a test pattern. Look up "Nokia Monitor Test" on Google; the
program has good test patterns for adjusting all aspects of analog monitors.

Yep that was the problem. I turned it off in MP9 and the videos are
playing again. Many thanks for that. Not sure how I would have found that
without asking in here.

I don't think it's documented anywhere. Found it myself by playing with the
options in Media Player Classic, which has like six rendering modes.

As a benefit, though, if you enable AGP fast writes, WMV videos will be
hardware accelerated. HD videos at 1080p can playback with ~ 30% CPU
utilization.

Many thanks for your help with resolving the video problem. Now that its
working, I'm able to use the cat 6.5 again. I re-installed the control
panel from the cat 3.7 and that's working with it as well.

I suggest using a more recent Control Panel, like the one from Catalyst 6.3.
Find it in the ATi FireMV download section.

I guess this will be the last cat upgrade needed for the 9x00 cards.
Surely newer cats are only optomised for the newer cards now. Any point in
updating the drivers in the future ?

Game fixes, mostly, and the occasional performance enhancement (like you saw
with Doom 3). Basically use the current driver until you find something
broken, then try the latest release at the time.

 

[?uzzled]

I suggest using a more recent Control Panel, like the one from Catalyst
6.3. Find it in the ATi FireMV download section.

Just tried the CP from 6.3. So far so good with the Cat 6.5 drivers. I've
noticed the option for WMV acceleration now.

Thanks very much for you help.