ATI driver support "disappointing"

Radeon 9000, 9700 won't run on Windows 98

I can't say this suprises me one bit. Why you ask? I used to own an ATI TV Wonder (PCI version), and check this out - I bought the card in 2000 brand new. The *only* OS it was supported under was Windows 98. Not Windows 2000, not Windows NT 4.0, but 98 only.

By this year, they FINALLY released *beta* software that allowed me to run it in 2000, but once again, it was beta and proved to be very unstable. Oh, and they said they would NEVER support XP with it. It's a freaking TV tuner card, it's not like it got outdated, why the hell shouldn't I expect full software support in modern OS's for a card I paid good money for?

I also used to have an AIW card, and I won't even go into all the problems I had with it. I also have a rage pro in my thinkpad, and I tried "upgrading" drivers as recommended by the indowsupdate.microsoft.com website.... it rendered my display completely useless, and I had to boot into safemode to install the old drivers again. The lesson I learned is that I will NEVER, EVER buy another ATI product again because it doesn't matter how good your hardware is if you can't write drivers.

Nvidia knows this, and their hardware is never quite as good, but their driver support is out of this world and done professionaly. The Canadian company could take a few hints from this... Oh, and feel free to post this if you find it informational, I'd like to see if anybody else has had similar problems.

Mike Staver

Email address supplied

Letter Two
Just to add my two pence worth to Mr Stavers comments on ATI's driver support...

Have to say in large I agree with him. In the past I've found ATI's drivers to be sub optimal at best, frequent graphics problems with all ATI products a few years ago including screen glitches, and random unexplainable driver failures.

In one job we had 100s of machines with the AGP verison of the Rage IIC some of which worked fine, some of which required the driver from a different model to work properly! Odd yes, but not as odd as the ones that worked fine then one day suddenly decided they wanted a different driver?! Very strange and just one of many odd little problems ATI drivers have given me in the past.

In fairness though I work in a large academic establishment now and we exclusively use ATI graphics cards from the Humble 8mb Rage XL to Radeon cards in high end machines and over the past 18 months or so the quality of drivers has noticably improved and now I'd have no hesitation in reccomending ATI as a good reliable product... I would say I've had more problems with recent Detonator drivers on my home machines (where I only use Nvidia) than I've had with the wide range of ATI products we use at work now.

ok more than two pence worth... I'll go now :-)

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