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ATI Video Processing Upgrade
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has a hands-on look at ATI Catalyst 5.13 drivers for the Radeon X1800XL, with a focus on video quality. They say it's the greatest leap in video quality technology for ATI since the original Mach64-VT. They triple their HQV Benchmark DVD scores by adding diagonal filtering, unusual cadence detection, and even noise reduction. On top of the video quality improvements, the new drivers enable ATI's hardware H.264 support as well as hardware transcoding. Best of all, Catalyst 5.13 will be a free upgrade scheduled to be released to the public next week."
...is that a hardware vendor is releasing drivers for free?
Welcome to 2005, I realize things must be strange for you considering you've been frozen since 1930...
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
FTFA: The Radeon X800 XL with Catalyst 5.12 failed miserably on both of these tests. The Radeon X1800 XL with Catalyst 5.13 flies through these tests with flying colors. Both XGI and ATI require a little bit of extra time to detect the 3:2 cadence in comparison to NVIDIA, but it's still fast enough to score a perfect score.
Their verdict from this:
Score
Tied 3rd place: ATI, NVIDIA, XGI (10 points)
So apparently their scoring system favors ATI from the get-go (read the article and you will see they knock Nvidia and XGI back if they take longer than the other, but as shown above they ignore the same discrepancy when it applies to ATI). Also, why are they tied for third!? Wouldn't that be tied for first?
I think this article is poorly written and i'm not going to trust the results until I see something from some other sites once a final release driver is out.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Sounds to me like a broken videocard.
Working ATI videocards work fine with latest ATI drivers. I've seen a lot of broken ones (9600, 9600XT, 9800pro series all common) that exhibit very odd problems with certain driver versions.
Swap in another copy of the card and the drivers all work flawlessly.
Stop blaming drivers when your hardware fails. Warranty is there for a reason. Naturally do check first if your windows is b0rked, but it's fairly common to see failing vidcards. People never clean their fans, dust builds up, heat does it's job and then we have truly bizzarre effects - which sometimes only show with specific driver versions.
(I work at PC repairs. I see these 'ati drivers stopped working' computers every week. 90% of the time if the usual 'reinstall windows + latest drivers' doesn't work, its a faulty videocard, and the other 10% of time time it's a faulty motherboard...)