Catalyst 6.1 Drivers Out

Couple of questions.
1. I have a 9600 which isn't great but it does what I need it to do. However it seems every driver release since 3.7, my performance has gotten worse and worse. I never had this problem with nVidia drivers and was wondering if anyone else with older ATI cards (or even newer cards) have the same problem.

2. If you download only the display driver, do you no longer get the ATI control panel? I've never had good luck with the Catalyst Control Center as it bogs my whole machine down, and after installing only the driver today it's running absolutely horrible so I went into advance display properties to change the OpenGL/D3D settings and it isn't there. ?

3. The ATI website giving anyone else issues?

You should and need to properly uninstall your old video card drivers before installing a new version. Although I personally don't do it myself.

Your best bet is to uninstall the current set of drivers, reboot in safe mode, run Driver Cleaner, then install the new video drivers. That is supposedly the safest way to update things.

The CCC is known to be completely horrible. Stick with the regular Catalyst. The advanced options can be accessed through the Display Properties > Settings tab > Advanced.On a more personal note, I have a 9600 XT 128 MB and have no problems with Catalyst 5.2. It was updated from 4.9 or possibly 4.11 if that version existed. You can try rolling back to an older set if you find a game or something that stops working or if you have issues with the latest ones.

You should and need to properly uninstall your old video card drivers before installing a new version. Although I personally don't do it myself.

Your best bet is to uninstall the current set of drivers, reboot in safe mode, run Driver Cleaner, then install the new video drivers. That is supposedly the safest way to update things.

The CCC is known to be completely horrible. Stick with the regular Catalyst. The advanced options can be accessed through the Display Properties > Settings tab > Advanced.On a more personal note, I have a 9600 XT 128 MB and have no problems with Catalyst 5.2. It was updated from 4.9 or possibly 4.11 if that version existed. You can try rolling back to an older set if you find a game or something that stops working or if you have issues with the latest ones.

The past couple of updates, I've been using the Cat-Uninstaller. (I previously uninstalled through Add/Remove before updating and I always remove the old first - old habit from the VooDoo days) I figured some garbage was being left behind so I started using that, but still have not noticed a change.

Will dig around for Driver Cleaner. (never used it - vid drivers are pretty much all I ever update as my processor/mobo are pretty old and haven't seen an update for the nForce 2 drivers in a while)

With regards to the advanced options, it just isn't there. I'm gonna unistall/reinstall again and see if that fixes the issue, but the tab for is simply gone.

I don't play any games but do quite a bit of graphics work, and it struggles with the 2D stuff almost as bad as the 3D. (Even in simple apps like Cool 3D) I use Object Dock and since updating today, it won't even work. The icons look like Tribes did running in software mode. Maybe the card is going bad or these just didn't install correctly. :shrug:

Thanks sir.

I can't stand the CCC or ATI. I will never buy another ATI v-card of any type.

Couple of questions.
1. I have a 9600 which isn't great but it does what I need it to do. However it seems every driver release since 3.7, my performance has gotten worse and worse. I never had this problem with nVidia drivers and was wondering if anyone else with older ATI cards (or even newer cards) have the same problem.

The 9xxx series is old. They've made all the performance updates to that core drivers that they reasonably can, and did so awhile ago. You will rarely see noticeable performance improvements from new drivers when your vid card is 2-3 years old. So, since performance for you probably won't improve, but you are still adding a bunch of code to your system anyways, there is a chance your performance can drop slightly. There is a peak performance for vid drivers. After that, the only reason for new drivers is if you have compatibility issues.

I can't stand the CCC or ATI. I will never buy another ATI v-card of any type.

Congratulations.

i just updated to the 6.1, man are isnt ATI software a freekin pain! but i got a huge jump in performance in a few games, most notably was FEAR, went from max fps or around 60 on med settings (running and x850pro) for most stuff to getting a max fps of 91 on max everything.

The 9xxx series is old. They've made all the performance updates to that core drivers that they reasonably can, and did so awhile ago. You will rarely see noticeable performance improvements from new drivers when your vid card is 2-3 years old.
I'm not looking for a performace increase as much as I've been looking for a stable driver release for the card. While the old 3.7 driver performed well, I had a ton of crashing/VPU recover problems. They eventualy got whatever bug was causing the crashes but I never got my performance back. Well, until now. I uninstalled/reinstalled and it's running like a top now.

I also had to download control panel seperately from an older driver release as it appears ATI has abandoned it in favor of CCC.

ok, so i thought everything was fine, but for some reason, after i installed the new drivers, two devices show up as "unknown device" i dont know what they are or where they came from, but it doesnt appear that im missing anything in the hardware manager that i have in my system...so what are they :P