Radeon 9800 Pro: Does Catalyst 10 Support Rotation or Not?

  • Thread starter Thread starter frank
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frank

Look, can someone please tell me if the Catalyst 3.10 drivers for the
Radeon 9800 Pro support flat panel rotation? I've seen posts that claim
that it does, and some that claim that it doesn't. As for me, I do not see
a "rotate" tab on "Control Panel:Display:Settings:Advanced" as some claim
to. WTF is going on?

I have to say that, although my 9800 pro is a decent card, ATI's control
panel doesn't come close to measuring up to nvidia's.
 
Well, I seem to have answered my own question. Apparently, at one point
this feature was enabled (back with 3.1) but, with the advent of 3.2 it was
disabled. With a considerable amount of digging I came up with this page:
http://www.thinkpads.com/external-video.htm . One poster details how to
re-enable the "rotate" and, sure enough, after following the steps I was
able to enable the tab. A few notes:

1. Although the poster says "There is NO overhead on the system using this
mode" I did not find that to be the case. This native ATI rotation feature
is just as laggy as pivot pro on my box (XP Home, AMD 2800, 1 GByte RAM).
This is very disappointing, as I can attest to the fantastic built-in
rotation support of NVidia's drivers, and Pivot Pro's flawless performance
under NVidia as well.

2. If you MUST tweak the reg, back it up first!

3. He mentions that there are "over 10 changes" to
"KEY: DisableTabletPCRotation". On my box, there were many more than 10
changes, probably more than 20.

Well, so now I'm out $340 for a card that won't properly support one of the
most worthwhile features of my $1200 Syncmaster T213. I suppose I'll call
Newegg and see about a refund, but it's been in my box for nearly two weeks
now. What a damn pain...
 
Well, I seem to have answered my own question. Apparently, at one point
this feature was enabled (back with 3.1) but, with the advent of 3.2 it was
disabled. With a considerable amount of digging I came up with this page:
http://www.thinkpads.com/external-video.htm . One poster details how to
re-enable the "rotate" and, sure enough, after following the steps I was
able to enable the tab. A few notes:

1. Although the poster says "There is NO overhead on the system using this
mode" I did not find that to be the case. This native ATI rotation feature
is just as laggy as pivot pro on my box (XP Home, AMD 2800, 1 GByte RAM).
This is very disappointing, as I can attest to the fantastic built-in
rotation support of NVidia's drivers, and Pivot Pro's flawless performance
under NVidia as well.

2. If you MUST tweak the reg, back it up first!

3. He mentions that there are "over 10 changes" to
"KEY: DisableTabletPCRotation". On my box, there were many more than 10
changes, probably more than 20.

Well, so now I'm out $340 for a card that won't properly support one of the
most worthwhile features of my $1200 Syncmaster T213. I suppose I'll call
Newegg and see about a refund, but it's been in my box for nearly two weeks
now. What a damn pain...
Click to expand...
You might want to try the DNA drivers out before returning the card.
http://www.dna-drivers.nl/
I'm not saying this will cure your ills, just something else to try and
see if it works better (perhaps the reg changes are more
complete/correct than what you did).
 
frank said:
Well, I seem to have answered my own question. Apparently, at one point
this feature was enabled (back with 3.1) but, with the advent of 3.2 it was
disabled.
Click to expand...

Well I had 3.4 and 3.5 and it wasn't there.

I recently decided to upgrade to 3.9 and there it is.

Chip.
 
Well I had 3.4 and 3.5 and it wasn't there.

I recently decided to upgrade to 3.9 and there it is.

Chip.
Click to expand...

This pisses me off: I've read every post regarding this issue that I could
find and, as I said originaly, some say it's there and others say it's not.
I take this to mean that the drivers are improperly implemented. What's
worse, there is no mention of the words 'landscape' or 'rotate' in the
control panel help file.

ATI needs to get their act together bigtime. I'll try the dna drivers, but
I'm already regretting my switch to ATI from Nvidia.
 
You might want to try the DNA drivers out before returning the card.
http://www.dna-drivers.nl/
I'm not saying this will cure your ills, just something else to try and
see if it works better (perhaps the reg changes are more
complete/correct than what you did).
Click to expand...

Steve,

Thanks for the suggestion. I've installed them, but there's no
improvement. Actually it's worse now than it was after the registry
tweaking I describe in another post to this thread. THat's OK: it was
unuseable before.

There is one significant difference: the DNA control panel icon in the
systray has a "rotation" menu. When using 3.10 I had to access the
"display:settings:advanced" menu to get to that tab.
 
frank said:
Look, can someone please tell me if the Catalyst 3.10 drivers for the
Radeon 9800 Pro support flat panel rotation? I've seen posts that claim
that it does, and some that claim that it doesn't. As for me, I do not see
a "rotate" tab on "Control Panel:Display:Settings:Advanced" as some claim
to. WTF is going on?
Click to expand...

Of course not, ATI drivers barely support "working properly", much less
anything fancy.
 
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