Re: A very sad personal decision with regard to "pc games"....

Zaghadka wrote:
It's a damn shame that for users like myself then, tv out is one of the top
features & reasons we buy an ATI card over the opposition. Why is it so hard
for ppl to kill 3 or 4 processes when they start up their system...I mean,
really? Do ppl still turn their pcs on & off every day lol, & frig around
with video settings all the time ffs? The CCC is the *least* reason to be
moving away from ATI Zag. That's just getting beyond pigheaded & irrational.

Agreed, ATi TV is the best on the market. I'm talking about software.

And it's just writing on the wall, not a death knell. But if it means that ATi
is unable or unwilling to write good software, then their hardware is worth a
dime. I bought a 3dfx Voodoo banshee in 1998 with a five year warranty, 2 years
late, 3dFX said they wouldn't produce Win2000 drivers. Guess what that 5 year
warranty was worth. I wrote my state attorney general, in fact. They didn't
care. I'm sensitive to these kinds of issues since that experience.

You sound very committed. Or you should be, to go through that process with any expectation of fair & just treatment ;). You should've just dressed it up & gone to a current affairs program, not that that kinda thing would've been sensationalist enough for the likes of those vultures probably.

So sure. Just like you, I take everything out of my HKLM:run section and shut
down the hotkey service and keep the winlogon dll from loading, but it's just
more and more crap, more and more exectuables to zap and contain. Now they've
added MOM.exe. And why are they spending all this time writing code that
clearly adds no value to the product. I can shut it all down, why bother?

Because you give yourself ulcers otherwise? :-/

In addition, I strongly suspect their 7.2 drivers sabotaged my ATI Tray Tools,
because it made them crash the machine, even *after* I reverted to the 7.1's. I
had to uninstall everything, and put it all back together with the 7.1's, and
it now works perfectly. Before, the machine was crashing went waking up from
sleep mode. What's next, a rootkit?

Probably. I rolled back to 7.1 w/o much dramas. I guess you can't expect a vendor to make sure they maintain backward compatibility with 3rd party drivers, now can you?

There's clearly an attitude problem at ATi, possibly deliberate sabotage of the
work of those who tried to fix their problem for free, and an unwillingness to
provide tight video drivers. The 7.2's were a first attempt to change that, and
I'm willing to see where they take it, but I take a dim view of the fact that
it crashed my third party control app.

I'm starting to visualise that tin foil hat on you right about now Zag ;-p

That's the full reason. I *am* an x850 owner you know. Before that, a 9500
owner, prior to that a 9000 owner and before that a Radeon 32MB DDR owner, so
you're not talking to someone who dislikes ATi.

I had a Riva128, then a Voodoo3 2000, GeForce 2 Ti, 9600Pro & now this X800Pro. I like to spread myself around ;)

But they are going in the WRONG direction, and have been for a while. We'll see
what the future Catalyst releases bring, but I'm sensing it's time to get out.

They make a good product, but if the software isn't there, their top notch vid
card isn't even a credible doorstop.

Again, I don't see it that way as software isn't a big priority for me. About the only annoyance used to be the CCC reseting my tv-out & multi-display settings after every upgrade. Seems to have been addressed the past 2 or 3 versions though.

The latest 7.2's do something to address CCC pigware, but the Tray Tools are
STILL better. When the CCC is still doing dumb things like opening loopback
sockets (why does a video control panel need to access the TCP/IP stack at
all?) and keeping a permanent stub loaded, and now, in the latest version, an
MOM.exe "monitoring application" loaded because it takes too long to load
otherwise, you know software design isn't a priority.
It's not software you really need to run very often, now it is? Perhaps you
have different computing needs to myself, but I'm tippin they're very
atypical if you spend heaps of time friggin around with video card s/ware &
lose sleep in the process.

Yup. I run a lot of old software that requires me to manually configure the AA
and AF settings, so I like having a handy tray tool.

Newer stuff lets you do it in game. For that, the CCC is "set it and forget
it."

Fair nuff.

Add to that the horror stories about ATi's OpenGL performance under Vista and
the fact that Knight's of the Old Republic *still* has artifacts all over the
place, even in XP, because they never bothered to fix the clear OGL driver
issues listed at Lucasarts, and you'd have to be crazy to stick with them.
OpenGL - what's that for gaming? Tx to Billy-boy it might as well not exist.
And Vista is one OS I won't be touching with a 100 light year pole (until my
life literally depends on it) & 1 game that most of us have long since moved
on from that you mention there. Come on, can't you do a bit better than that
Zag??? ;-p

Nope, but I think it's enough. KotOR has artifacts. ATi was *told* it had
artifacts. They never fixed it. The Lucasarts site tells you to check for
driver updates. They never came, though they at least fix the framerate issues
in Dantooine. Put short, their OpenGL drivers suck.

I never saw anything like that in Kotor, but I was probably just using the default DX drivers. Why use OpenGL with Kotor if you have an ATI card anyway? More pigheaded stubbornness? ;)

But ATi would apparently rather *market* their cards than make them work. They
spent a lot of time designing Ruby, who flopped, and far less time fixing BUGS.

Never heard of Ruby. See, marketing BS at work & not working :)

It's the ATTITUDE that bugs me. The result of that attitude AFFECTED me, and
I'm rather disgusted. I plugged in an Nvidia card one day and found out what
KotOR is SUPPOSED to look like. Nvidia's dopey "The Way It's Meant To Be
Played" slogan took on a whole new meaning for me that day.

Heh. With the new R600s(?) it's hard to ignore ATI though. They look to be oh so yummy. Not that I'll afford one for another year *sigh*.

Maybe that's the result of deliberate sabotage, but it's the fact. If you want
to play KotOR without lines and seams all over the place, plug in an Nvidia
card.

Again, I don't follow, as my 9600Pro & X800Pro after it played Kotor just fine (but perhaps with DX). There was the hardware mouse driver bug early on which caused the game to crash (IIRC that was ATI driver related), but that was easy fixed.

I don't think it prudent to ignore developers like Lucas, Bioware and iD,
nevermind the ENTIRE linux community, and expect to be a market leader.

OpenGL is important, despite Microsoft's fantasies.

I don't disagree, but to be realistic, for the gaming market right now it's just a spec of dust in an ocean of M$. If you can't beat em...

They're going to be the bargain market on-board graphics chip company in 5
years if they keep this pace up. Reminds me of the last days of 3dfx.
Is this where we start calling you POD now (prophet of doom)? ;)

You can call me on the carpet in five years if the situation is otherwise.

I'm no prophet. ;^)

Just a very naughty boy ;)

The only major issue I've had in the past 2 years that are even remotely
vidcard related is the latest 7.2 driver incompatibility with UFO:AL, which
is just as much the game devs fault as it is ATI's & will likely get fixed
in the next UFO patch soon.

As far as I'm concerned it's all about image quality, featuresets, card
performance & driver stability - all the rest is so much marketing wank &
sales sophistry. And I can still play all the latest games on my humble
X800Pro no problem at all. I may be due for a X1950AGP on the next round of
price drops, but that'll see me out for the 4 yr cycle, as expected.

Right. You haven't had any problems. I've seen and had problems. I've been with
them since the original Radeon, too. It seems to me that their focus is off,
and as a result their users have to edit their registries just to get their
computers to boot right, I hope they change it. No one should have to edit
start up lines that shouldn't be there in the first place just to boot.

I'm sorry you've ended up at the arse end of the tech-issues minority, but that just tells me there's other factors possibly at work here (mobo, bios, OS/patches, etc). They say oils ain't oils & any 2 PCs are nothing like each other if you look closely enough. It's a miracle they run most games & software as generally reliably as they do.

If they *don't* change direction, they'll end up in the shitter, just like
3dfx. Anything can happen, save more of the same.

Well, they're in the AMD shitter now. I doubt that conglomeration will go quietly into the night any time soon without at least forcing some serious competition out of the opposition, which can only be good for the rest of us one hopes.

--
'Some day, guys like John Lewis will be remembered as the
"Judges" of an Internet Priesthood, and will be quoted by
4th grade teachers in AntArtica. Do we realize that
millions of people read our feeble-minded debates every
single day .. forever?' - johns 23/2/2007

Nostromo
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