Less than one month after the last update, AMD subsidiary ATI has just kicked out another update of its graphics drivers for Windows Vista.
Get them here.
(Nvidia, it’s your turn.)
This month’s ATI drivers
Published
7 thoughts on “This month’s ATI drivers”
Comments are closed.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
The last set screwed up my second monitor turning it muddy in appearance. I quickly reverted to the prior version. So I am underwhelmed by this announcement and will wait a long time before “updating” my Vista drivers again.
Tweaktown has a couple of comparison benchmarks of the ATI catalyst drivers, which show very little difference between 7.5 and 7.6 in terms of performance. To be honest with you though, I don’t trust their figures that much so I would take whatever you see there with a grain of salt, but apparently the bug fix list includes a fix for dual monitors, so you should probably give it a shot Richard.
On other news creative has finally released full Vista-compatible drivers for some of its low-end sound cards (Audigy Value, Audigy SE, Audigy LS, and Live! 24-bit). I think though u still have to use their Alchemy hack for games that are designed for XP’s sound drivers (I could be mistaken on this though!).
Richard, for what it’s worth I’m using the Catalyst 7.5 drivers here on a dual monitor setup with a Samsung 1600×1200 and a Dell 1680×1050. No problems at all.
Richard, that color thing happened to me when I installed 7.5, but I read about a fix in the DriverHeaven forums. Open Catalyst Control Center and go to the Color Tab, scroll down and reverse the setting for Black & White Levels for whichever monitor is affected. I think ATI has this setting reversed (in certain situations) because mine has to be set for “Microsoft MCE” instead of “PC Standard” to get proper color.
I have not installed the 7.6 driver so I’m not sure if this was fixed since 7.5.
Most of the changes seem to be for the sake of improving game performance, rather than workaday stuff. I’m not a game player so I’m starting to become a little hesitant to get the newest drivers just for the sake of having them unless something is visibly wrong.
The one thing I notice being most consistently problematic is when I have a document open in Word 2007 and I scroll really fast through it with the mouse wheel. I sometimes get this bizarre “smearing” effect that I was tempted to blame solely on the driver, but I’m thinking it’s more an interaction between the driver and the program, since this does not happen on my other machines.
I was looking forward to this release, because they finally supported the ATI All-in-Wonder properly, so that you can use the video watching and recording capabilities in Vista. Unfortunately, as soon as I installed 7.6, IE 7 slowed down to a crawl. I mean it took minutes for a menu to pop up! I uninstalled 7.6, and everything is back to normal in IE7. Here’s hoping they will fix things in 7.7.