AMD Releases Catalyst 11.11 Drivers

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• SandmanWN - Sunday, November 20, 2011 - link

  according to the driver issue statistics released by MS, Nvidia has had more driver issues in the past couple of years. What you say is your own "personal" experience.
  
  Im calling BS on the over 200 machines as well. There are only about 240-260 working days a year. Unless your only job is a lowly tech building computers, in which case I would like to introduce you to this thing we call a contract where you can get OEM's to do this mundane task for you. I mean really, is that what you want to do with your life? Tech world is huge. You should find another specialty and broaden your horizons.

• SilthDraeth - Monday, November 21, 2011 - link

  Viruses often times cause installation issues for numerous things, not just drivers, though drivers are definitely affected.
  
  I haven't built 200 machines, probably not even a dozen in my lifetime, but never had an AMD/ATI issue. Never had it with any Dell's we had at a school that had ATI chips, or when installing Windows on Macs, with ATI chips.
  
  Never had issues installing drivers as part of a pxe boot, and pushing the OS and drivers through network either.
  
  That isn't to say that issues do not exist, but sometimes a driver install error has nothing to do with the driver, and something to do with the user, or the hardware, or some other problem with the OS.

• Autisticgramma - Monday, November 21, 2011 - link

  This is FUD, 10 years ago this was true. You're showing your gray hairs.
  
  nVidia Drivers have been the primary cause of XP crashes. period. (by sheer number of errors, in absolute numbers, yes partially due to market share.)
  
  Additionally guys who switch back and forth, need to completely uninstall the drivers before you can hope to have a decent experience with moving from/to AMD/nVidia. (2 complete restarts here people)
  
  Ive had 3 amd cards since Win 7 R2 not one issue. I probably reinstall windows more often than most, and I'm willing to bet is the root of my stability. nVidia for the last few years has been selling cards data center cards that have the capability of running video. Add a huge tesselator +Crysis 2 'tessalate water in every frame fiasco" and you have a claim for better performance, add how hot they run (think pentium 4) and were on to the issue.
  
  AMD could pull off a clawhammer in the next 6 months if they pulled their head out.
  
  I was all about nVidia until gforce 2xx's, (yes the 260 was decent). but performance/watt has been way off since before then.
  
  Additionally, Ive personally deployed about 220 nVidia chip laptops in the last year and 20% have video flicker issues. (The driver is missing the power options all the others have, setting it to default to lowest power to the backlight.)
  
  They both have their issues, but Ive had more issues with Steam than AMD vid drivers.

• Divide Overflow - Saturday, November 26, 2011 - link

  I've never had a problem that couldn't be solved by uninstalling the old version and then installing the new version. So I guess your geek cred really is in jeopardy .

• piiman - Sunday, November 27, 2011 - link

  Both have driver issues and both can have install problems. Once the driver gets messed up on a system it can be a nightmare installing update. Both have cleaning tools to remove ALL traces of their drivers and if you are having problems I suggest finding and using them.
  
  Your blanket statement that "AMD always has more drivers issues" is just false and makes me think you're the fan boy.

• RaistlinZ - Saturday, November 19, 2011 - link

  I just installed the 11.11's yesterday. No issues so far with my 5870. I get some visual glitches while running Skyrim, but I think they're known Skyrim issues and not related to the 11.11's.

• Divide Overflow - Saturday, November 26, 2011 - link

  Try running the 11.11a hotfix driver for Skyrim performance improvements and a single GPU.
  
  They are supposed to release 11.11b for muti-GPU systems soon.

• jkostans - Sunday, November 20, 2011 - link

  ATI just keeps botching driver releases. Luckily I had no problem with my 4870 setup using the Rage/BF3 "preview 2" drivers. I played through rage with no issues and have no reason to go back and play it at this point. On another 5850 setup however, not a single driver has worked to fix RAGE including this release. This one is actually worse than the previous two "preview releases" causing some weird geometry popping. At this point I don't care because I've already beaten the game, but it just shows ATI's incompetence in the driver department.

• Ethaniel - Sunday, November 20, 2011 - link

  ... you can enable the "Workaround install", and the "Show update" options editing the "installmanager.cfg" file inside the "config" folder. That still works...