playing no game without a quicksave. Or a keyboard/mouse interface. I tried a couple of the recent console ports like COD4 and that John Woo gamer and what awful games they were. Terrible graphics and worse interfaces, the menus to get started were pure terror, the gameplay sucky beyond description. The only thing console gaming's got going for it is -nothing!

8.3 was disastrous, 8.4 slightly fixes some of it but it'll take at least 5 months to fix all the bugs 8.3 introduced, but by that time ATI will have again done a huge change to their drivers so we'll be dealing with yet another set of new bugs, which most likely won't ever be fixed for current graphics cards because they don't feel like having things work on cards older than 3 months (just like nvidia).
Welcome to the world of graphics cards.

If all you can do to generate page views is make sensationalist headlines, making a mountain out of a molehill.

Only the Inq would lambast a company for FIXING PROBLEMS.

Hmmm... I never realised that Vista was 4 years old. The only place that the fix shows up is in the Vista fixes section...

With online updating, consoles are now being patched regularly as well. I see PC gaming going the way of the Dodo, while devs get to ship half-arsed games because they can patch them on consoles now, too.

Call me a cynic.

Moan, PC fanboys, moan.

Any current gaming platform without GTA is a dying platform.


It's more likely these bugs haven't been there for four years but instead some other recent driver introduced a new bug in an older game. Since these are older they probably went unnoticed in internal testing. These new drivers are just addressing those new issues.

so I guess by the time Counter Strike 3 comes out I should expect the fix for my card for when it decides I've been playing enough and shuts down...

This article makes the assumption that such an issue existed four years ago. This article makes the assumption that this was an issue that effects all cards, including those available at the time of Doom 3's release.This article complains about the fact that the issue was fixed at all.

What's the issue here? Is the issue that AMD/ATI's and NVIDIA's support is bad, or is the issue the fact that they're good?

Every time someone complains about a driver issue with graphics cards, I just think back to companies like Creative who do next to nothing with their drivers. It helps me to keep things in perspective. That AMD would even give a four-year-old game any attention is commendable.

<i>At least gamers on those platforms know that they won't have to wait upwards of 12 months for a bug free gaming experience.</i>

Ask the XBox 360 folks if Team Fortress 2 is currently exploit free. You'll find that most of the exploits that have been fixed in the PC version are still present on the consoles. Maybe video card drivers lag behind consoles as far as fixes are concerned but the games themselves get much more frequent updates on PC. For that reason alone, I'll take PC gaming over consoles any day of the week.

Not really. Catalyst 8.4 only works for Radeon HD2 and 3 series cards. Hence the bug is actually a few months less than a year old. 

Maybe the fact that it occurred in a game that was already 3 years old at the launch of HD2000 series has something to do with the reason why it took ATI so long to get around to fixing it?

And also, when I come to think of it, the console versions of Doom III ran at something like 640x480 at best. Even at 1280x1024 the PC gamers still got to see significantly prettier graphics.

Console games have all sorts of bugs!! I get what your saying .. but minor problems aren't the reason that the pc is getting wopped in the sales department.

ATI is dead because AMD killed her

There is no real competition for Nvidia out there

... although it's disgusting these bugs take so long to fix, at least they do finally get done.
There are plenty of us out here who still play the old games.
Personally I only recently stopped playing Total Annihilation, and that was only because I got Supreme Commander. However it's still on the hard drive, and could be called up at any moment.
Plus of course it's lovely to see how these old games play when they're being pushed along by quad core CPUs and monster video cards with more gusto than the designers could ever dream of when the game was released.
Resolution: Max
Texture quality: Max
Shadow detail: Max
AA: Max
Smug mode: MAX!
:-D

Rumble Roses XX (360) wouldn't work reliably on release. It required a firmware update on the console -and- a downloaded patch before you could be sure that starting a game wouldn't hang the console.

That is, of course, assuming your console didn't RROD beforehand....

They promised this when vista was out? But never seen any?

Let's be honest. Virtually all games have bugs in them, and consoles exclusive titles are no exception. While I don't own a modern console I can think of some annoying glitches from console games in the past.

1. Street Fighter II for SNES experienced horrible slowdown often.
2. GTA3 and GTA Vice City (PS2) had problems with the display not keeping up to you driving down the roadway. Textures would be missing and a variety of other problems.
3. Madden 08 on PS3 and the every annoying pause in live play like the CPU is getting pinned out.

Really the only advantage to console gaming is the ability to plug in a game and instantly start playing it without worrying about installing it and setting display settings. 

The advantage to playing PC games is most games are backwards compatible and you can pick a game from 1996 and play it. You get user created mods. Memory hacks to enable a cheat to help you out, or just make it much more fun on subsequent times playing. PC games allow save anywhere features instead of console like save once per mission or only at predetermined checkpoints. Finally bug fixes through patches that are available to PC users.

I'm still waiting for AMD/ATI to fix the HD decoding bug that has been consistently producing ghosting when playing back HDTV since Catalyst 6.xx(requires registry fix to disable denoising - but still crap compared to nVidia Pure Video and CoreAVC because while it removes ghosting, IT INTRODUCES NOISE INTO THE PICTURE).

Of course, removing AVIVO doesn't solve the problem because it's a function of the Catalyst Drivers.

According to the Catalyst 8.3 release notes, there is supposed to be a slider setting in the Catalyst Control Centre that allows you to adjust the noise reduction value.

Guess what? It's not in CCC 8.3 OR 8.4!

Not only are they getting towelled by nVidia in the gaming stakes, they've now dropped the HD decoding ball as well.

All I can say is:

Goodbye ATI. Here's mud in your eye!
You're about as useful as tits on a bull.

Too harsh? Too bad!

"At least gamers on those platforms [PS3 and Xbox 360 ] know that they won't have to wait upwards of 12 months for a bug free gaming experience."

Oh really? Try telling that to anyone who lost all their cars in GT4 because they tried to play from a backup of their gamesave. Or anyone who lost a gamesave in GTA:VC because they saved in the ice cream garage. et cetera.

If patches are easy, programmers get lazy and nothing works till SP1 or even SP2; if patches are hard, they simply never get done.

Either way, we lose.