New NVidia and ATI Drivers

[bapenguin]

Both of the major players in the PC Video card market decided to give PC Gamers an early Christmas present with new driver releases.

NVidia Forceware 81.98 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_81.98.html)

ATI Catalyst 5.13 (https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=293)

[peabody624]

Any idea what this fixes?

[YoungAlCapone]

A present....are you sure?

[Varsity]

Any idea what this fixes?
The Catalysts introduce Crossfire: https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/Catalyst_513_release_notes.html

[Rirath]

Never thought of driver releases as much of a present... but cautious optimism will have me installing them none the less.

[Dag-Sabot]

does it apply the the GeForce7800 series cards?

[dolbex]

Nvidea Forceware drivers apply to all their recent cards (recent being 5 years old)

[Zurik]

Can't check the release notes since i'm at work, anyone know if the new Nvidia drivers are much improved over the last ones(81.95 I think it was)?

[XxSATANxX]

I'm Playing NFSMW on some prety old drivers......runs great on my ti-4600. I'll monitor
the boards see what folks say before updating..

[Dirty Harry]

New Features
This section provides information on new features that are introduced in this release of Catalyst®. New features include:

H.264 Hardware Acceleration
ATI CrossFire™ Support for the ATI Radeon® X1800
HQV Video Benchmark Support
H.264 Hardware Acceleration
Catalyst® 5.13 software suite introduces H.264 hardware acceleration for the ATI Radeon® X1800, X1600, and X1300 product line. H.264 is advanced video coding that provides significant reduction in bit-rate compared to standards such as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. The ATI Radeon® X1800, X1600, and X1300 products provide hardware acceleration for the playback of high-definition content that is encoded using H.264. Using the Catalyst® software suite 5.13, along with the Cyberlink H.264 decoder available from http://www.ati.com/technology/h264.html provides H.264 hardware acceleration.

ATI CrossFire™ Support for the ATI Radeon® X1800
ATI CrossFire™ allows for multiple Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to be placed within a single PC, to provide superior gaming performance. The Catalyst® 5.13 software suite is the first Catalyst® to provide ATI CrossFire™ support. CrossFire™ support is available when an ATI Radeon® X1800 CrossFire™ Edition product is installed with another Radeon® X1800 product. Further information on ATI CrossFire™ can be found at: http://www.ati.com/technology/crossfire/faq.html

HQV Video Benchmark Support
The Catalyst® software suite 5.13 introduces full support for the HQV DVD Benchmark. These driver tweaks provide a better DVD image quality, and higher benchmark scores.

Issues Resolved in Catalyst® Software Suite 5.13
The following section provides a summary of the issues that have been resolved in the latest version of Catalyst®. These include:

F.E.A.R: Slow game performance is no longer noticed when using CrossFire. Further information on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21270
The Video Preview no longer fails to change to its default settings when swapping the display mappings using the Catalyst® Control Center. Further information on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21174
Attempting to stretch the display horizontally using the Catalyst® Control Center, no longer results in the horizontal stretch mode failing to be applied unless the display is stretched vertically first. Further information on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21175
The PowerPlay™ option found in the Catalyst® Control Center no longer defaults to the enabled state after initial install of the display driver for systems containing an ATI Radeon® Xpress 200 series product. Further information on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21180
Auto-detect no longer fails to be applied as the default setting for the Deinterlacing option when first entering the Video aspect page of the Catalyst® Control Center. Currently the option is set as Weave. Further information on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21185
Catalyst® Control Center: Attempting to extend the desktop display when using a CRT, TV and DFP display devices no longer results in display corruption being noticed on the primary display adapter. Further information on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-20982
Attempting to set the CRT as the primary display device after hot-plugging a DFP display device and enabling extended desktop mode, no longer results in the CRT failing to be set as the primary. Further information on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21269
Catalyst® Control Center: Entering the Overdrive™ aspect and changing the GPU setting to 509 and the memory setting to 505 no longer results in color corruption and the Windows XP operating system rebooting. Further information on this resolved issue can be found in topic number 737-21229
Known Issues for Catalyst® Software Suite 5.13
The following section provides a summary of open issues in the latest version of Catalyst®. These include:

BattleField 2 Special Forces: A blooming or ghosting effect may be noticed when playing the game in night vision mode. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21263
Beyond Good and Evil: Flickering artifacts are noticed on the game characters after approximately 15 minutes of game play. Further details can be found in topic number 737-20795
Dark Age of Camelot: The game exits to the desktop immediately after launching, or may play for up to 15 minutes followed by a VPU Recover error message being displayed. Further details can be found in topic number 737-20794
Dragonshard: Playing the game under Windows XP Media Center Edition with CrossFire™ enabled, may result screen becoming out of sync, and a scrolling display image occurring shortly there after. Further details can be found in topic number 737-20975
Fable: The Lost Chapters: Playing the game under Windows XP MCE may result in the shadows found within the game appearing jittery, when the desktop resolution is set to 1024x768 32bpp, and all the game options are set to default. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21184
Serious Sam 2 Demo: Enabling CrossFire™ may result in a performance drop being noticed when playing the game under Windows XP Media Center Edition. Further details can be found in topic number 737-20976
WARHAMMER: DAWN OF WAR: Starting a skirmish game on a 4 player map under Windows XP, may result in the game performance appearing choppy when using an ATI Radeon® X800 series, and having all of the game options set to high. Further details can be found in topic number 737-20974
World of Warcraft: A VPU Recover event may occur when launching the game with high level avatar and rotating or zooming within the Blackwing Lair or within Searing Gorge Further details can be found in topic number 737-21265
Catalyst® Control Center: The SmartShader™ effect is not removed from the 3D preview when attempting to restore the default values in the Catalyst® Control Center. Further details can be found in topic number 737-20846
The Apply button in the Custom settings of the Advanced mode, within the Catalyst® Control Center Video standard settings, is grayed out when playing a media file. Further details can be found in topic number 737-497
Connecting an HDTV to an ATI Radeon® X700 series may result in the HDTV being detected as a CRT or TV under the Windows XP operating system. Further details can be found in topic number 737-20783
Attempting to install the integrated WDM driver under Windows XP may result in an error message being displayed indicating that the hardware is not installed because the install Wizard cannot find the necessary software. Further details can be found in topic number. 737-20784
The PAL FM fine tuning algorithm is currently using 200 MHz bandwidth which may overlap FM channels resulting in the same FM channel being found several verdana during the scan function. Further details can be found in topic number 737-20979
Launching the Adobe Gamma calibration application and moving the gamma slider back and forth, results in the Task Manager being filled with cli.exe until the system becomes low on memory. Further details can be found in topic number 737-20980
Catalyst® Control Center: The preview for the Deinterlacing aspect found in the Catalyst® Control Center is currently unavailable when using the ATI Radeon® X1300. Further details can be found in topic number 737-20986
The Video Preview found in the Standard Settings of the Video option of the Catalyst® Control Center may fail to provide a preview after hotplugging an LCD panel to an ATI Radeon 9500 or 9800 and selecting to extend the desktop. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21173
Connecting two display devices to the ATI Radeon® X850 CrossFire™ Edition and one display device to the ATI Radeon® X850 XT may result in the display device connected to the Radeon® X850 XT still being active once CrossFire™ is enabled. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21177
The WDM Drivers may not be enumerated due to the Capture chip not being detected when using the ATI Radeon® X850 XT (ViVo) as a slave card on a system containing an ATI Radeon® X850 CrossFire™ Edition. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21178
The secondary display device may fail to activate when attempting to enable clone mode when using an ATI Radeon® X800 GTO. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21179
Using the Custom option when installing the software driver results in the Theater™ 550 software driver not being present. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21183
The apply button may remain inactive when attempting to change the Hue and Saturation settings found in the TV Properties\Avivo Color settings when enabling a TV as the primary display device and a CRT as the secondary display device. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21264
Connecting two display devices to an ATI Radeon® X1600 series product may result in the device manager failing to detect the secondary display device. Further details can be found in topic number 737-21266

[Twigmaster]

does it apply the the GeForce7800 series cards?

Yeah im pretty sure...

[Skookum]

All I know is the last set of drivers finally fixed the corruption and crash to desktop I was getting with BF2 on my X800 Pro (Woot!)

[Dr Quincy]

Lets hope it gets rid of the same problem with mine

[H.Bogard]

Nvidia's drivers are crap. I`m seeing shitty (jagged?) shadows in nfsmw and bf2......what the fuck???

[Thin_J]

Nvidia's drivers are crap. I`m seeing shitty (jagged?) shadows in nfsmw and bf2......what the fuck???

I don't see jagged shadows in either one and I'm running these new drivers.

Could be something specific to a certain card. I'm running SLI 7800GT's.

[Twigmaster]

Both of the major players in the PC Video card market decided to give PC Gamers an early Christmas present with new driver releases.

NVidia Forceware 81.98 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_81.98.html)

ATI Catalyst 5.13 (https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=293)

These drivers actually kind of fucked up my computer, the diplay wont show up on the TV and that really pisses me off cuz I liked having like 4 displays and now im down to like 2... early christmas present my ass...

[bapenguin]

These drivers actually kind of fucked up my computer, the diplay wont show up on the TV and that really pisses me off cuz I liked having like 4 displays and now im down to like 2... early christmas present my ass...

Don't shoot the messenger... :(

[[Jez]]

Damnit! Why do Nvidia put the release notes into a .pdf

[Gaz]

Proberbly a deal with Adobe, they seem to be all the rage right now.

As for the drivers... Yay. I wonder what they sacrificed performance for this time in order to bump up the frame rates in their benchmarks? I wonder if nVidia fixed any of the shortcuts they were taking with their AF rendering? Or if ATI finally made a safe set of drivers? No-one I know has ever had a successful time with ATI drivers, I really hate them. Still, at least they keep on updating their drivers.

[JessePeel]

Haven't tried them yet, seeing how my Radeon is running just fine with the Omega drivers I have installed instead. ATI's stuff reduced Warhammer 40K Winter Assault to a jittery mess, leaving a bad taste in my mouth...

[TheDudeOnTheCouch]

If it aint broke, don't fix it. I'll wait until I have some serious problems with a game before I go changing my drivers.

[PathMaster]

the Omega drivers always seem to be a great download..I suggest them..at your own risk of course ;-)

[Dag-Sabot]

Nvidia's drivers are crap. I`m seeing shitty (jagged?) shadows in nfsmw and bf2......what the fuck???
I get that too with my 7800GT. I dont think i have made the wisest choiceby going with Nvidia. Im really reluctant downloading this update incase it screws me over even more...
(i nearly get seisures as it is, trying to play bf2, with the flashing spikes of jagginess, etc.)

[Stormwatcher]

Hellooooooo... nVidia drivers are a lot better than ATI ones. This kind of weird problems might br your fault, you know. Is everything fine in your system? Do you get any problems in other games or 3D Mark?

I won't upgrade the drivers, the newes ones add nothing to my 6600Gt and the MSI version I use has on the fly oc.

[B_Money]

These drivers actually kind of fucked up my computer, the diplay wont show up on the TV and that really pisses me off cuz I liked having like 4 displays and now im down to like 2... early christmas present my ass...

You know, you can roll back the drivers in XP. Or you can just install the old drivers, if the new ones messed you up so much.