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AMD Launches World's First Mobile DirectX 11 GPUs
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Less than 4 months after releasing the first DX11 desktop graphics card, AMD has followed up with a whole lineup of mobile graphics processors based on the same architecture. The new Mobility Radeon HD 5000 lineup includes four different series of GPUs designed to serve everything from high-end gaming notebooks to mainstream thin-and-light systems. AMD has based these processors on the same silicon chips as its desktop Radeon HD 5000-series graphics cards, so performance shouldn't disappoint. The company also intends to follow Nvidia's lead by offering notebook graphics drivers directly from its website, as opposed to relying on laptop vendors to provide updates."
Who the hell other than the poor sods still doing x86 Windows only game/graphics development still uses that turd of an API DirectX?
Let's just go over the platforms I work on:
PC graphics development - OpenGL
Linux graphics development - OpenGL
Mac graphics development - OpenGL
Android graphics development - OpenGL ES
iPhone graphics development - OpenGL ES
Embedded ARM based system development - OpenGL ES
even some OpenGL for console development.
1995 called and wants their "ATI drivers are crap" comment back.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
2010 called and wants their ATi card to run stable and stop crashing in any number of PC games: Borderlands, Saboteur etc. There have been public known issues with the 5xxx line of their cards causing system locks because of poor drivers and incompatibilities. http://www.joystiq.com/2009/11/03/borderlands-glitch-watch-2009-radeon-powered-pc-crashes/ http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101665 etc. etc.
1995 called and wants their "ATI drivers are crap" comment back.
Obviously you have never tried running Linux on a system with a ATI graphics card.
Are these cards fast enough to run the games in DX11 mode?
DirectX 11 in a mobile device? So the device doubles as a hairdryer?
I want this account deleted.
I have three in my system. :3
~ C.
Support in the open-source drivers is being written as fast as ATI can verify and declassify docs. Also the r600/r700 3D code should be mostly reusable for these GPUs.
~ C.
ATI dropped support from their binary drivers because these cards are supported by the OSS driver. They aren't good enough to game on, so why would anyone want to run the proprietary ATI driver with this card anyway?
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
Yes, it was a major issue when the game released, ie. essentially every 5xxx series card getting hardlocks; the recent drivers appear to have more or less fixed it after gearbox just ignored the issue for a couple months. Was also a huge issue with catalyst AI and breaking textures, but that was also a fix from the last catalyst update. I guess it's less of an ATi driver issue and more developers botching it these days, ATi is definitely doing better lately. see: http://gbxforums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?t=78815&highlight=radeon
Recently I've not seen an issue - HD4550 in my desktop, HD3200 in my lappy, XPress200m in old lappy (which did have major driver issues in 2006)
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
The older cards are still capable of doing the minimal of acceleration needed to do desktop effects but yet the MESA drivers seem to be incapable of providing reliable 3D acceleration of said desktop effects.
At least the higher end models will. They have 800, 400 and 80 stream processors respectively.
As well as a good deal of other Windows graphic programs. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that Microsoft Windows isn't a major player, but you are fooling only yourself. Windows development matters a whole lot, and DX is the native API and thus many use it.
However, in this case the reference is to features of the card. See OpenGL is really bad about staying up to date with hardware. They are always playing catchup and often their "support" is just to have the vendors implement their own extensions. So when a new card comes out, talking about it in terms of OpenGL features isn't useful.
Well, new versions of DirectX neatly map to new hardware features. Reason is MS works with the card vendors. They tell the vendors what they'd like to see, the vendors tell them what they are working on for their next gen chips and so on. So a "DX11" card means "A card that supports the full DirectX 11 feature set." This implies many things, like 64-bit FP support, support for new shader models, and so on. IT can be conveniently summed up as DX11. This sets it apart to a DX10 card like the 8800. While that can run with DX11 APIs, it doesn't support the features. Calling it DX10 means it supports the full DX10 feature set.
So that's the reason. If you want to yell and scream how OpenGL should rule the world, you can go right ahead, however the simple fact of the matter is DirectX is a major, major player in the graphics market.
Xbox 360 graphics development - DirectX
XNA (Xbox 360 indie games) graphics development - a managed API based on DirectX
Some of the reviews of "Dirt 2" had suggested that ATI 5xxx cards were up to 50% faster in DX9 mode.
I wouldn't know, but the 800 stream processor mobile card looks like it has very similar performance to the desktop 5xxx cards. Even at 75% speed, it should still be playable. Besides, DX11 is brand spanking new, I would expect some time before the drivers mature.
It was only 3 years ago when I gave up on ATI and switched to NVidia because ATIs drivers could not handle bad inputs, and would crash the entire system. So I had to write my own abstraction layer to ensure that no bad point coordinates and so on could be sent to the driver. I also filed kernel crash bugs with ATI that took forever to get fixed. After I switched to NVidia, I have yet to see a single kernel failure due to programming mistakes. Their drivers are just rock solid. So much better to develop on that it would take a lot to go back. I also had much the same bad experience with the open source Intel drivers.
Obviously you have never tried running Linux on a system with a ATI graphics card.
It works fine for me... I've never built an nvidea system and ati graphics drivers have always come through for me.
I know both of our arguments here are anecdotal, but 3D acceleration and compiz-fusion are running great on my laptop with a mobile x1270 with the MESA drivers. 3D just worked right out of the (figurative) box. The motherboard that used to be in my HTPC had an x200 onboard and 3D acceleration worked fine with minimal effort on that machine as well.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
So, in your opinion, all technical progress should stop at once?
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
hmm xrandar support, new kernel support? can i run vs. git sources? or just 1-2 releases back? does it support the 57xx and 58xx cards yet? how about TVout? Also can i use the card "hard"(WoW raids) for 4+ hours? and maintain uptimes of weeks? how about the current release of xorg? All of the above only applies to linux.
Anyways until then i'll be sticking with nvidia cards.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Obviously you have never tried running Linux on a system with a ATI graphics card.
Obviously you have never tried running Linux on a system with a nVidia graphics card.
It's seriously a PITA to get new drivers working on a new kernel with an old card. Anything pre-GeForce 8 may have annoying issues. Not a problem for desktop linux with a new videocard - but if you were setting up a Myth box on that old Athlon XP w/ 6600GT, you may be in for a headache.
Avoid distros like Ubuntu with automatic kernel updates. One update and suddenly your graphics drivers won't work and X won't start. Then it's back down to the CLI to figure out why the fully supported drivers with full 6600GT support don't work with your 6600GT.
P.S. I've been jaded by automatic updates.
Just upgraded my brother's laptop over the holiday. Seems ATI dropped support for his GPU in their proprietary driver so now he has a choice. Option one, use the open source drivers which provide no 3d acceleration. Basically 3D is completely unusable. Option two, use an older distribution which has the required version of X, kernel support, and all dependent software. And with the second option comes all the associated security issues of running an old and unsupported distro. He chose to run a current distro and be stuck with 2d-only acceleration. All of the 3d games he had on his laptop are now completely unplayable; measured in fractions of frames per second.
It turns out ATI decided they would simply stop supporting his GPU and AFAIK, they have not released any 3D documentation on it. This is exactly the reason I've gone out of my way to never buy ATI. They drop support of cards like crazy leaving users completely stuck. And in something like laptops, which is exactly what this article is about, that means your entire laptop is now obsolete.
I don't care how many ATI fanboys there are that want to bash NVIDIA for providing binary blobs - the fact is, their stuff works and works well and best of all, they don't leave their users high and dry. The only problems I've had with NVIDIA was years ago when their first started providing 64-bit Linux drivers. So say what you will to support ATI, at the end of the day, they are still doing the same old thing and hurting their customers. Case in point, I have an nvidia video card which is older than my brothers laptop which is still supported by NVIDIA's drivers.
So what do you want as a user? Stuff that works year after year or a company (ATI) telling you when your equipment is obsolete and that you need to replace the entire computer?
For Linux there is still only one 3D option - NVIDIA. Period.
The architecture changed significantly. Not to mention that it actually has more functionality under the open-source driver than it ever did under the closed-source one. What in the hell are you bitching about?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
AMD is developing the open-source drivers. It's paying people to work on them. Does that make them not AMD's drivers?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
You forget to mention the Apple Newton. There are people STILL using their Newtons today. It had handwriting recognition years ahead of anything comparable, and communication capabilities. When Steve Jobs went to Next, Mr Sculley(sic) (another corporate droid - in the theme of your post) shut it down.
Over the years Newton enthusiasts have asked the company many times to release the code so they could port their beloved operating system to newer hardware as their Newtons died of old age. Apple always refused. I can only speculate, but I think this new device may leverage the experience of the Newton - if not the code - to resurrect the table PC concept.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I have a system with a Radeon 9800 Pro card in it, no problems so far with Ubuntu.
A BenQ Joybook with X300, and a Toshiba Satellite with HD3470. And I have been running ubuntu since 7.10 to 9.10 with ATI drivers in these machines. Issues, such as flickering video and incompatibility between 3D acceleration and Compiz do exist you know. I can only Google Earth on top of compiz fine only just recently (9.04 & 9.10) if I'm not mistaken. Xinerama support, which was excellent in 8.xx became unusable in 9.04. I can't hook the notebook to projector during the 8.xx series if compiz is running.
Well, perhaps it’b BECAUSE THEY STILL ARE!
I have written many lengthy comments about it. When they did still use APIs that were so old, that after being deprecated for a long time, they were taken completely out of the kernel. Rendering the drivers useless.
The same thing now happened with Xorg 1.7.
And how long ago did neither compositing, nor xrandr work? One or two months?
Hell, video still does not work. (Oh, it renders it. But unless you want to see huge black and white blots of over and underexposure at the same time, while having huge blocking in that tiny color space in-between, you can not call it “working”.)
Also, acceleration is NIL.
And let’s not forget that I can reproducibly crash the driver, by compiling the kernel or a big program in a terminal. Or swich a monitor off when in console mode. Basically everything where that crutch called “atieventsd” does not receive an event.
And don’t even dare to ask about proper OpenGL 3.0 + GLSL support.
And for the Linux driver being a the piece of shit that the Windows driver is, with a emergency layer wrapped around by a one-man team (seriously: ATi Linux driver development is one poor guy), that’s still impressive!
I will never again buy an ATi card, unless they open-source EVERYTHING! No exceptions. And then I wait a year on top of that, for the Xorg team to catch up.
You can say what you want about nVidia’s binary blob. But when I could not use my brand-new HD 4850 at all, a year ago, I was very happy that the onboard nVidia chip “just worked”. No hassle. emerge nvidia-drivers, and DONE.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Actually, if you rely on your laptop manufacturer to provide you updated drivers, they DO suck. The decision to over the drivers from their website for mobile cards is an amazing decision they should've made years ago.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
The $300 card I bought around 2002 had enough driver issues that I've never bought another ATI card since. So you can add at least 7 years onto that.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Seriously? Why did I get modded troll? Every time I mention Linux I get modded troll.
It's well known that you need to keep your drivers up to date to work with new kernel versions. And when those new drivers don't like your videocard anymore, you get screwed over.
I wouldn't have mentioned it if it wasn't common, but it is. It happens all the time.
To be frank, it's about as common as nVidia drivers messing up during an update on Windows - but that at least kicks you to an 800x600x8 desktop, or only BSODs when entering a game. When your linux drivers are too new for your card, you have to go back to an older kernel with older drivers that actually work.
P.S. This issue is so common that when I posted about it on the Ubuntu forums, a half-dozen people replied that they were having the same issue within that hour. Some of the people had just joined (1 post), and we all had different cards with the same affliction.
Please don't use the troll mod to dismess real aggravating issues.
Actually this is one problem you can lay squarely at the feet of MSFT. Instead of investing in their core business and pushing Windows they have spent all this money on Xbox, and now it is coming back to bite them in the ass. How? Because a whole lot of new computers, along with a whole lot of windows licenses, are bought by those that like to game on Windows.
And since the x360, which in all likelihood be the same model they will be selling 3-5 years from now, due to the cost of designing a console, supports mostly DX9 game companies are designing for the x360 FIRST, and then putting out a shitty port and calling it "multiplatform" later. Which doesn't leave a whole lot of PC games left worth having, and the MMOs like WoW will frankly run just fine on a 3.2Ghz P4 with a 36xxHD AGP card.
This is why you have ATI pushing Eyefinity, and Nvidia pushing GPGPU, because ever since Ballmer took over it has been a big FU to gamers and their core markets. But MSFT better wake up and smell the stupid, because as the Linux guys will tell you, just about everything EXCEPT Windows gaming can be done on Linux just fine, with cheaper hardware and no licensing fees. All it is gonna take is a big OEM getting really pissed off at being burned on all those juicy gamer rig sales to really push Linux and cause the Ballmer monkey to crap his pants.
Windows 7 is definitely a step in the right direction, but if they don't push hard to get REAL games for it, instead of shitty console games with the word "multiplatform" tacked on (God I hate that fucking word) then it will all be for naught. I know many gamers that are still using XP, as thanks to DX9 there really isn't a compelling reason to switch, and Linux is getting better all the time. MSFT really needs to push their games division to put out REAL DX11 games for the PC, push their partners to do the same, and get it done ASAP if they don't want their marketshare to be dominated by XP with the Mac and Linux creeping up to bite them in the ass.
I used to buy $150+ cards to game with just about every year, and build a new PC (with a new Windows License) every other year just so I could crank up the purty. Now everything I play looks nice on a $60 ATI 4xxx card, and I doubt my quad core will be going anywhere for the better part of a decade. Why should it? DX9 is what 99% of the games are using, the few games that would need more powerful hardware are frankly ePeen tech demos like Crysis that are NOT fun, so why should I build bigger? Why should I buy a new Windows every other year so I can pass down my older machine? I can't find any reason to. And THAT is what MSFT needs to be worrying about. The x360 is doing just fine, it is PC gaming that is on life support. So Ballmer better get off his ass and get to work ASAP.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What exactly is wrong with ATI drivers? Exactly? Because I was actually worried when I bought my first ATI a few years back because of all the horror stories I had heard, but frankly I ain't had a bit of trouble out of ANY of my AMD/ATI gear.
I started with an ATI X1950 IIRC, because my 6200 was getting long in the tooth and Nvidia wanted crazy money for anything AGP (BTW you can still get decent AGP cards from ATI) and when I installed it (after using Drivercleaner of course) behold! It all just worked. And it is still working as a matter of fact, with my youngest boy using it with a 3.06Ghz Celeron to play Lunia, Aruarose, Perfect World, and a few other MMORPGs.
When I passed it and the 3.6Ghz P4 on down to the boys I decided to take the plunge and support competition and go all AMD. First I gamed for nearly 3 months on the IGP! of my 780v board (it played Bioshock! It didn't suck!) and then upgraded my dual to a quad core and my GPU to a 4650HD. To even push my luck I got an ATI USB TV Tuner off of Woot! so I could watch cable on my monitor. To my complete surprise, even the TV Tuner, which anyone who has ever had one can tell you can be seriously flaky driver wise, just worked beautifully. i have pushed my luck by upgrading the drivers a couple of times, even changed OSes from XP X64 to Windows 7 HP x64, and it all "just works" day in and day out, nary a glitch or skip, and it all runs cool & quiet without a bit of troubles.
So what exactly is wrong with ATI drivers? Because surely with 3 different boxes, running 3 different OSes (XP32, XP64, 7 HP x64) I would have run into something, wouldn't I? Surely I just can't be the luckiest ATI customer on the planet? And since the "bang for the buck" is squarely in the AMD/ATI camp I have been selling a lot of lower end AMD duals and quads on ATI boards and have yet to have a customer complaint there either. So what am I missing?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm sure I'll be modded into the toilet for this, in these modern times, but:
If you don't like it, code something better. Can't code? Document it better. Can't document? Organize it better. Can't organize? Pay someone else to do it (or any of the other things, really).
There's lots of ways to help push the open-source ATI drivers along, even for a skill-less schmuck as myself. (I just don't care enough to even bother with complaining about it anymore.)
Kid-proof tablet..
I had an issue due to some weird config that could not be fixed by cleaning the computer of drivers and then reinstalling. The video drivers would send a message to new windows telling them to maximize. Depending on how the window was coded, it would obey. This was very annoying as suddenly tiny dialog boxes would fill the screen. I tried to debug the issue and all I could gather from it was that it originated from ATI's multi-monitor manager that tells windows to start up on certain monitors.
-]Phreak Out[-
I have been using ATI's since the Radion 7000 PCI model (AGP was still new and most games didn't need that much bandwidth lol) to be honest I have like 3 issues. One is current (might be Windows 7) Star Craft gets all trippy looking on Bnet. It plays ok but after like 10 minutes I feel like I licked the wrong kind of paper.
The other 2 issues are with installing the newest drivers, this happened a long time ago under XP and just last week on 7 64 bit edition.
I had to use winrar to decompress the installer for the newest driver 9.12 and use the driver installer in device manager to get it to install. Usually I just double click and go go go lol Having to do it that way brought back memories of Windows 95 (it was always best to use the device manager to do drivers back then)
At least I was not the only one its a known issue with the current driver, the weird thing is not everyone is having it and a fresh install of windows does not have it happen. Look for a 9.12b or something soon.
Other then those ultra rare issues I am happy ATI customer.
J. Dzhugashvili writes...
Thank you Stalin.
On the whole, I would at least partially agree with you, but this is a project to make ATI cards worthwhile under Linux. It is therefore reasonable to want AMD to properly support it if they aren't going to provide drivers themselves which are comparable to the Windows ones.
I have the same experience with my 200M. On windows, I can play older games with no problems. On linux, using the open drivers, I don't get good enough acceleration to use Compiz with no extensions.
Which GPU? Which version of Win7 x64? The reason I ask is reading your post I decided to "press my luck" again (BTW I recommend Quick Restore Maker before updating drivers. The also have an excellent FixWin and Wintweaker tools at the bottom of the page for Win7) and installed the latest update to 9.12 on Windows 7 HP x64, along with the latest transcoder for same.
After reading your post I expected a big problem, but....well nothing happened. It all "just worked", even my ATI USB Capture card. Which BTW if you want a good USB card for Win7 media center keep an eye out on Woot! for the ATI 600 USB. It works great and gives me a good picture on cable.
So it must be a specific set of software/hardware causing the error, which happens to every manufacturer from time to time. I mean when you think about the myriad of software/hardware combos you can come up with in Windows it is just staggering. What kind of IGP do you have? As I have found that sometimes Intel or Nvidia IGPs can cause trouble with an ATI discrete card, which is why I use Drivercleaner whenever I'm adding a new card. But in this case I just ran the .exe and everything was golden, didn't even need a reboot.
In case it matters this is on an AMD 925 quad, with a 780VM board and a 4650HD Gigabyte card. But I have found as long as one stays off the "bleeding edge" of GPUs the drivers from both companies tend to be pretty stable. I am sticking with AMD because of the bang for the buck and the fact that I don't trust Nvidia after the bad solder fiasco,but I haven't seen any real problems with either companies drivers in a long time. These kids don't know what hassle is until they have dealt with ATI and Nvidia Win9x drivers. Boy now there was an unstable mess!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Wrong. Don't compare Motorola G4 junk to Intel Core duo. G4 has 133Mhz FSB for God's sake. Even if G4 had "bigger Mhz" (Sixpack), its 133Mhz FSB would still guarantee the horrible performance.
But... If we compare first G4 CPUs of the time to Intel CPU of that day, we can easily match 2x speed difference, especially with decent Altivec instructions. Obviously, you also need a good programmer/developer to effectively use them.
Lets talk about G5 and current POWER6, especially POWER6 which 4.0 Ghz speeds are common. Or Cell broadband?
Funny thing is, MS never learned their lesson. DirectX 10 was Vista exclusive (!!!) technology and all gamers were running XP! So, except the usual MS ass kisser companies, nobody was that stupid to release a directx 10 game.
Guess what? DirectX 11 is a Windows 7 exclusive technology!
I pity the idiots coding in directx only in this age, especially after iPhone and Intel OS X revolution. How many years must pass for them to understand?
All I did was pop in a Fedora 12 livecd and my R500 card started working. Absolutely no configuration. Whatsoever.
Hell, my old roommate uses Gentoo and even he doesn't have to do much of any configuration to get it running, all he does is build X as usual, with radeon support. If you still need to do manual configuration of X on a modern setup, you are failing hard.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Somehow it feels that AMD is completely loosing it's focus on CPUs. Great wins at graphics market every few months but nothing (really) exciting coming on CPU front. That's sad.
Obviously you have never tried running Linux on a system with a ATI graphics card.
. One update and suddenly your graphics drivers won't work and X won't start. Then it's back down to the CLI to figure out why the fully supported drivers with full 6600GT support don't work with your 6600GT.
P.S. I've been jaded by automatic updates.
Wrong, dkms takes care of automatically (re)compiling the nvidia module if needed. This happens on boot, before X starts. All good.
So use the older driver. It's still out there.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
It is therefore reasonable to want AMD to properly support it if they aren't going to provide drivers themselves
ATI/AMD *do* support the Radeonhd project. They provide documentation and test code - although at a very slow pace.
On the other hand Nvidia are completely ignoring the Nouveau project. (At least, they don't sue or DMCA neither).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Oh specific hardware.. good god lol
Lets see..
ATI Radion X4870 1GB GDDR5 HIS Ice Q
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161292&cm_re=Radion_4870-_-14-161-292-_-Product
Creative Audigy X Fi Fatality edition
Antec Power Supply
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371026&cm_re=Antec_power_supply-_-17-371-026-_-Product
8GB's of DDR2 800 from OCZ (supposedly will go to 1024 but meh not needed lol)
Asus P5K EPU mobo.
Intel E8400 (not OCed)
I try to stick to top of the line hardware. When possible. By top of the line I mean quality not necessarily the newest stuff (its so much cheaper to shop a gen back on most parts)
Software end I tend to run the latest drivers and patches for everything I can get my hands on.
Windows 7 64 bit ultimate edition (loving the hell out of it)
AVG, Comodo firewall. Pretty much thats it I like to keep things lean, well I do have an iPod so all the cruft that entails is also running...
Not having any issues right now I managed to get the driver installed I just had to do it the old fashioned way :) and I am sure the next round of drivers will fix this (it did the last time ATI had a driver that had the same bug. Not a show stopper just an annoyance and it was years ago the last time this same thing happened lol)
I don't think the issue I had was a common one to be honest. This was a clean install of Windows 7 too so its not like I could blame it on being upgraded from Windows Vista or something. I am really at a failure to explain why the drivers would not install, maybe the moon was out of alignment with mercury or something lol :)
I know, my GF says I tend to devolve into technobabble when it comes to hardware and troubleshooting She is pretty good about reminding me that not everyone looks at PCs the way that jocks look at Mustangs,LOL.
But I can guess where you may have had trouble and can point out a good little tool to help you hunt down weird bugs in the future. The most likely source of trouble was sadly the Creative card. I have gone so far as to stop selling these cards to my customers because in the last few years their drivers and support have really gone downhill. I recommend the Asus Xonar cards for my customers and will be putting one in to the new PC my band is getting. Their drivers are really solid.
I have to agree on Windows 7. I have switched myself and many of my customers over and we all love it. The "smart troubleshooting" seems to fix a lot of little errors some of my customers are good at generating. For trying to hunt down the source of errors, especially ones where they just "shit themselves and die" as one of my more colorful redneck customers so eloquently puts it, I use Dependency Walker. It is only a few hundred Kb, no installation, runs off a flash, easy to use, just a great little tool to have. Just point it at an executable and it will list any missing dependencies it may have. You'd be surprised how many weird Windows problems can be traced back to a program having a missing dependency.
I do have one question though: Why on earth are you running AVG with Comodo Firewall? Comodo makes an excellent AV that integrates perfectly with Comodo Firewall, is free, and has a better detection rate and uses less resources than AVG. So why drag your nice PC down with AVG? I have been recommending Comodo AV/Firewall combo for the past two years and even with my most dangerous click happy users I have found Comodo AV stops bugs dead. I have found it to stop many more infections than AVG ever did, and with less CPU and RAM suckage to boot. So why both?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Wrong, dkms takes care of automatically (re)compiling the nvidia module if needed. This happens on boot, before X starts. All good.
Correct.
And then X doesn't start, and you're left wondering what the hell went wrong.
Off to the forums, where other people are complaining...!
Have you seen the interface they use for the Windows drivers? It's like a giant bloated turd cooked up in .NET, which makes even the simplest tasks a chore. Why they moved away from the interface they used back around 2004 I'll never figure out. At least they are stable now.
Might switch back to using the built in Comodo Antivirus. Back when 7 first came out...... I had a pretty nasty problem with the file protection thing.
I think it boils down to how I built my install. (I have 3 hard drives) So on XP I downloaded all my drivers and firewall and all the freeware I can get my hands on that I use. Then I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 offline (I don't like to plug in things until I have security up and running)
So I installed Comodo and thought "yeah one package its great" then I went online.... there where of course updates and I said yeah lets update everything. The machine needed a reboot. upon rebooting I get a message from Comodo file protection thingy "MS mouse driver.exe or something was trying to install to blah blah blah would you like to allow?" At this point I couldn't move my mouse and since it was a bubble I could not use my keyboard shortcuts :(
It took me about 1 hour to figure out what do to fix that. I also know that MS updates the drivers fairly often so I wasn't in a hurry to repeat that experience lol I am sure they have it all fixed up now.
P.S. going to try that dependency walker thing lol
Also yeah I was kind of thinking it may have been my creative drivers :( They make some awesome hardware they just need some better software people.
That is why I always install AV LAST. I know it sounds backwards, but since XP if you have the Windows firewall running and are only doing updates you really have no worries as Windows Firewall by default doesn't respond to incoming pings and port scans. Then Once Windows is fully updated I install AV, head by Ninite and get the usual programs like FF, Flash, Java, etc, if it is a customer's box add OO.o on Ninite (I have Office 2K which works great in Win7) and finally wrap it up with K-Lite Mega Codec Pack (which covers just about any A/V format I'm liable to run into) and all is golden. Working PC repair you have run into most "gotchas" at least once so you know what to avoid. Fool me once, ehh?
Now that you have your PC stable I would recommend Comodo over AVG. With my customers I had quite a few that managed to infect themselves while running AVG and so far ZERO with Comodo! And if you have family or friends you have to do the occasional "tech support" for (what geek doesn't, huh?) I would recommend bookmarking Ninite. They have all the most common programs, along with excellent tools like ImgBurn, just have them pick what they want and run the combined installer. Oh, and NO TOOLBARS! That's right, ninite strips out the toolbars on apps like CCleaner and Java so you don't have to tell them "uncheck the third box on the second page" or whatever.
And if you like Dependency Walker you should search around the net and try to find a copy of "Computer Repair Utility Toolkit V2". Unfortuantely some FOSSies had a fit and maid them take down the main links, but nothing disappears on the net, right? It has dozens of tools to troubleshoot and repair a PC, fits on a 1Gb flash easily, and it is trivial to add your own tools. Working on house calls it has saved my ass more than once, and is a worthy tool of having in your toolbox. Just add WinFix and Ultimate Windows Tweaker from this page (bar on lower right has the download links) and with the Computer Repair Toolkit you can fix a good 85-90% of the Windows problems you run into. I hope this helps!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Thank you for all the tools!!! (haven't even downloaded them yet but I will lol)
One you might like to try is Hiren's Boot Disk (keeping in mind I haven't tried the ones you offered yet so they might be close in function)
Its a boot CD with just too many tools to list on it. The most useful one I have ran into is disk cloning and also a tool for cracking the SAM file on Win2K boxes (how do people "forget" the passwords for the admin account so often?)
Thank you for your information I will add it to my own!!!
Why wouldn't X start?
Yeah, that's the problem. Why? And on the forums most of the replies are about as helpful as yours.
<irony>Oh well, time for an OS reinstall.</irony>
No problem with the tools, Oh and hey I found a link for the repair utility toolkit for you. It is less than 100Mb and has over 50 tools for things like networking, recovery, virus removal, etc and it is butt simple to add your own. I added Malwarebytes Antimalware, along with a few tools from the portable freeware collection and all is golden. If you have to deal with any XP boxes I would suggest autopatcher which lets you have all the patches for Win2K-Vista offline, along with common add-ons like Java and .NET. They are gonna add Windows 7 support soon but the new autopatcher isn't out yet.
And while I thank you for the suggestion, if I end up with a machine that is that borked I use a WinPE LiveCD with built in support for resetting keys, running malware scans, launching system restore, and about a dozen apps, all from the GUI. It works just like a Linux LiveCD only I can use Windows apps natively. It is pretty nice and since I use online virus scans like Trend Micro Housecall I don't have to constantly be updating it.
But you should definitely download the repair toolkit and give it a spin. The AV will of course be out of date but that is easy enough to fix, and it has great tools like DriveImage, CCleaner, tools for finding out product and wireless keys, TweakUI, a ton of really great tools all set up in an easy to use and easy to add to package. Even if you only have to work on a PC once in a while it is a good tool to have in your toolbox and with flash sticks being so cheap it is an easy way to have powerful tools in your pocket. I added a bunch of programs like FixWin and Ultimate Windows Tweaker and it still only takes up 268Mb of a cheapo 512Mb drive I had laying around. Nothing to install, just unzip and use. Try it, I'll bet you like it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.