All those monkeys banging away on their keyboards and you picked the wrong one
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Since this thread turned into a nVIDIA vs ATI thing I might as well post my experiences.
Back in the GeForce 8800 days my old GeForce 6600GT started to slowly die so I went looking for a replacement. At the time ATI had gone dark as far as the mid to high-end market was concerned and as a result NVIDIA was peddling its high-end cards at ridiculous prices. Not only that, but the "new" cards they were making were slight variations of the existing models; a higher frequency here, some more RAM there and every single one of them overpriced in a bid to bleed us dry. It pissed me off to no end.
Then suddenly ATI finally came up with the brand new HD4550 and sold it 50-100 euro less than the inferior GeForce 8800GT. For a month or two I watched retail businesses peddle their overpriced shitty GeForce cards to clueless customers (remember kids, NEVER walk into a computer shop without knowing exactly what you want to buy). Obviously I opted for a HD4550 and everything was great. For a while.
See those early ATI cards came with a ludicrously underpowered cooling system, a tiny single slot fan controlled by drivers coded by morons. This became a problem when new games came out. If I tried playing Starcraft 2 on that card, the fan would go on at whatever low RPM it was set by default and would only speed up to a jet engine loud 100% RPM when the card reached a certain temperature. Said temperature was 100C (I kid you not). As soon as the temperature would go under 100C (i.e. 99C) it would slow down all the way. Then the card would go over 100C and it would speed up again in an endless cycle of stupidity. This was further exaggerated by the stupid heatsink design which got completely clogged with dust in a few months even in a case with dust filters like mine. Unsurprisingly after 2-3 years the card started to fail.
I bought my current ATI HD6870 to replace that (I'm dumb, what can I say) which baring the OpenGL stupidity, is great. Well, except the fan which starts to vibrate at certain RPMs. So now every time I open a container in Fallout, the card heats up to a specific degree, the fan increases its RPM to a specific point and it starts to humm. My copy of Fallout has the noisest containers ever.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Curious. I just put an ASUS 3450 Radeon AGP card (if that's not thread-killing suckage, I do not know what is) in my poor old PC, with my main screen on DVI1 at long last. I've put the Mac's screen on VGA (its also connected to the Mac on DVI) and I notice that the Radeon detects the second display (make and model, maximum resolution etc) and will send a signal to it when I extend my display onto it, but the picture is blank (LED is blue, backlight is on).
Its not just that the desktop backround is black and you didnt move a window or the mouse onto it? @Ragnax said:The Catalyst Control Center management app is a complete piece of trash. Nine out of ten times it doesn't install correctly or boot up correctly, which results in Windows event logs being hammered with error entries continuously. If you have an ATI card and have noticed that something is continuously accessing your harddrive, then uninstall CCC and enjoy the blisfull silence thereafter.
Its always installed and booted fine for me. Although occassionally it will say the runtime has crashed after remoting into my desktop. There used to be eventlog spam whenever you played back video using the video overlay, but iirc that was the drivers themselves, not catalyst, and I think it was fixed a few months back.... Atleast with installing the Catalyst driver through Windows Update you'll get a WHQL-certified driver that ATI had to ship to Microsoft for review.
Also, fairly certain that monthly catalyst releases/drivers are all WHQL certified (except preview releases), because y'know, Windows complains like mad when you try to install a uncertified driver. Example.@topspin said:
The Catalyst Control Center installs a shell context menu handler so that when you right click say a directory in Explorer, the first item is "Start ATI Catalyst Control Center".
Where? I only see something like that when right clicking on the desktop... @DOA said:See those early ATI cards came with a ludicrously underpowered cooling system, a tiny single slot fan controlled by drivers coded by morons. This became a problem when new games came out. If I tried playing Starcraft 2 on that card
The 4550 is a ridiculously underpowered card, its TDP is only 25W (compared to 150+ of high end cards), seems odd even a single slot cooler couldn't/wouldn't cope. If it was an OEM card, the OEM may have messed with the bios fan profiles and/or changed from the reference cooling system.That being said, I recall SC2 on release causing lots of complaints of video cards overheating (iirc due to actual GPU load being 95% or something, similar to benchmarking software, whilst most "normal" games only load the GPU to 80% or so).
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@dr spock said:
Its not just that the desktop backround is black and you didnt move a window or the mouse onto it?
No. Blakey knows, I'm dim, but I'm not that dim ;-)
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@bannedfromcoding said:
I don't smoke... and the tag refers to the lawn variety.
in that case i am sorry. i was trying to understand it but i couldn't actually find any other possible meaning, although the one i settled for felt like a stretch
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@topspin said:
The Catalyst Control Center installs a shell context menu handler so that when you right click say a directory in Explorer, the first item is "Start ATI Catalyst Control Center"
I only get that option when right-clicking the desktop, not in any context menu in explorer.
For the desktop it's pretty convenient, though of course if I wanted to I can create other shortcuts.
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
he "pretty please make DVI work" checkboxes, but those don't do anything
They don't do anything for me either. :\
I get monitor corruption and flitting image across the screne bcause it thinks I'm sending something like 1850*1024 to the LP2065, but a quick press of the input button resolves it. It then operates at 60Hz, until I leave, it goes to standby, and I reactivate it with my mouse, and then it's 80Hz again, which results in 20% increased speed of cursor which is pretty important.
This Hz switching-between-standbys disappeared when I added the second monitor.
I don't get your particular faults though. I wouldn't chalk it up to DVI, but just to this combo of video card + monitor hardware.
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@Ragnax said:
The Catalyst Control Center management app is a complete piece of trash
All hardware-accompanied software is trash. Everything. This Canon scanner software of mine is quite operational in that it scans and basically never fails, but the UI looks like trash and the program code is probably trash, even if it is technically functional.
@Ragnax said:
Unless you are a control freak who wants to tune everything you really don't need CCC for anything. The important stuff can all be configured from Windows' own control panel.
What is the important stuff according to you?
I say it's Antialias, adaptive-AA, anisotropic filtering, let application override my settings, colour tweaks for the monitor, desktop rotation, vertical refresh.
Those are options I've never seen anywhere at all except in the vendor's own software. Sometimes a game lets you configure a subset of those.
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@dhromed said:
I only get that option when right-clicking the desktop, not in any context menu in explorer.
the menu you get when right-clicking desktop (or anything else within windows) is the context menu of explorer, though the items in it change depending on context - it is still the same one menu ;)
@dhromed said:
@topspin said:
The Catalyst Control Center installs a shell context menu handler so that when you right click say a directory in Explorer, the first item is "Start ATI Catalyst Control Center"
so it actually doesn't make sense that you (would?) get the option when right-clicking a folder. do you really have the option when clicking on a folder too?
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@dhromed said:
I don't get your particular faults though. I wouldn't chalk it up to DVI, but just to this combo of video card + monitor hardware.
I did some research and my experience ties up with common DVI problems. The left screen started out black with random flashing green dots. Fixed that by changing the DVI cable. Then I still got the occasional half a second of no picture, or the picture would shift 30% over to the right briefly (leaving a black border), and there was a certain spot that would briefly show a corrupt rectangle. I returned the screen thinking that it was broken, and the replacement works a lot better (almost perfectly). The other display has the random white and green lines.
I thought it was the screen at first, then I thought that it was the video card after I sent the first screen back and the other started playing up (because DVI on my PC was so far untested), but it was once I went DVI at home that I realised what was going on: unlike work where I'd gone from two Dell VGA displays to two HP DVI displays, my home monitor always supported DVI, and moving to DVI was the point when it started to act a bit weird – mostly the picture briefly shifts slightly a few minutes after waking from hibernation. It only happens occasionally – my home setup is far more reliable even if the LG L2000CP is the unwanted ugly duckling of the 20.1" S-IPS world.
Now, it could be another ATI screw up … Maybe ATI just can't do DVI right to save their lives. Moving to DVI has cured the rolling bands problem on my LG L2000CP at home, but on the LP2065, predominantly the right-hand one, I see that effect even worse than I do at home (it's the same S-IPS panel inside, and this is a defect of that model of panel) …
Another ATI bug: my HD 2400 XT comes with a DMS-59 splitter, and the card numbers the screens the opposite of what's written on the splitter, so now I have screen 1 on the right in Windows, which is confusing when I want to map windows to specific displays. I think it's DVI that numbers them back to front … One day I should reconnect them both when I'm logged in as another user, maybe if I move back to analogue to get rid of white lines flashing across my windows. I don't see all the problems that you get though – otherwise the screens work fine, and they're great!
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
mostly the picture briefly shifts slightly a few minutes after waking from hibernation
How large is the shift? It sort of sounds like when LCDs auto-calibrate to analog signals (eg over VGA) in an attempt to best match up the analog signal "pixels" with the display pixels. If its doing this over DVI maybe theres an analog signal being transmitted because the display and/or the graphics can't send/accept digital over the DVI link.It could be a failing graphics card and/or monitors, but its hard to test without known good cards/monitors to test against. Make sure the card isnt overheating etc.
As for the splitter/display numbering, that should be a simple change in software (either via windows display settings, or catalyst), or just swap the cables on the splitter. If your card has more than one output (DVI + VGA is common for older cards), you could try using those instead of the DVI splitter...
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@SEMI-HYBRID code said:
the menu you get when right-clicking desktop (or anything else within windows) is the context menu of explorer, though the items in it change depending on context - it is still the same one menu ;) so it actually doesn't make sense that you (would?) get the option when right-clicking a folder. do you really have the option when clicking on a folder too?
Screw you, pedant. You know what I meant.
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@dr spock said:
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
mostly the picture briefly shifts slightly a few minutes after waking from hibernation
How large is the shift?This!
Imagine the fullscreen picture shifted off the screen by 50%, and flickers back and forth like a fluorescent tube with startup trouble.
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@dhromed said:
@dr spock said:
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
mostly the picture briefly shifts slightly a few minutes after waking from hibernation
How large is the shift?This!
Imagine the fullscreen picture shifted off the screen by 50%, and flickers back and forth like a fluorescent tube with startup trouble.
It didn't oscillate for me – the image was suddenly ~30% off to the right for a fraction of a second, and the gap was black (I think the gap is white when my home display does it, but that only jumps left a few mm). I still see occasional rectangles, I think I've seen black with the telltale green speckles, sometimes it looks like something else was shown in that space for a frame or two. It plays tricks with your nervous system, making you jittery and overly sensitive – I thought I saw Outlook's reminder window reappear in the middle of screen briefly after I'd minimised it or brought another window on top, but that would be absurd.
Analogue is far more reliable! There is not even the tiniest fraction of a difference in picture quality at home between VGA and DVI on any decent analogue display (the LG L1753HR is not one of those though). The image quality was as flawless on VGA as it is now on DVI; I just had the LG S-IPS panel rolling bands problem, except it was more jittery, while at work it's very clearly smoothly moving up the screen. Of course the LP2065 also brings with it the old skool IPS after-image problem but I'm used to that nonsense now after three years of it at home :-)
As for ATI, I've never considered anyone else after the bad press NVIDIA got for their Vista drivers ;-)
The most confusing bug to date was FlashFXP 4 RC mis-drawing toolbar alpha; I never got out of the developer precisely what he was doing, but this is XP and there is no composited graphics in XP, so how could alpha mess up? I got the same bug on my laptop, both machines have Intel GMA onboard, similar chips. I even left him with my PC to play with one night, and nothing he tried could resolve it. Fitting the Radeon card instantly cured the bug. No idea on that one, no idea at all. My experience with Intel's OpenGL drivers has been pretty awful (3D objects flashing random colours, massive display corruption, all sorts), although no bluescreens from them so far. The only system crashes came from Windows 2000's Matrox drivers. (And I left Matrox because my Matrox card didn't do OpenGL either – Dx-only card with excruciatingly slow OpenGL emulation.)
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@dr spock said:
As for the splitter/display numbering, that should be a simple change in software (either via windows display settings, or catalyst), or just swap the cables on the splitter. If your card has more than one output (DVI + VGA is common for older cards), you could try using those instead of the DVI splitter...
Ever considered a career as a private investigator?
Obviously I don't want to unplug a display while logged in, otherwise all my windows and desktop icons will end up in a heap, so I'd have to remember to do it while logged out. I guess there's a full-height PCIe card with DMS-59 and another DVI or VGA connector making three? The reason for this card having DMS-59 is because it's a dual DVI-I card in low profile form factor, and that's the only way to get both connectors into a single slot. My ASUS Radeon 3450 in low-profile configuration uses two adjacent slots (!!) – if I wanted the other slot back for something I'd have to saw off one side of the bracket. Fortunately I don't. (All the things you don't learn until you get it home and realise they're on the wrong kind of grass.)
The alternative of course is dual DisplayPort, as you can fit two discrete, standard ports within the low-profile space, but then I'd be hosed if DVI didn't work, as DisplayPort is digital only, hence the miniature connector.
PS don't buy one from Dell – they don't even ship both DisplayPort → DVI adapter cables in the brown cardboard box. It's a dual frigging DisplayPort card, why would anyone buy one if they didn't intend to use two displays with it? I thought that was an error on Dell's website, like the Vostro all-in-one desktop with an integrated webcam that was completely omitted from the specs (and the nice Indian chappy couldn't shed any light on whether the spec, or the photo, was in error over that one). In this case, Dell were quite serious about it shipping with exactly one DP cable. But it had to come from Dell, to avoid hours of wrangling over whether Foobarbaz ATI Rebadger's specimen requires PCIe power or not, as Dell are exceptionally frugal with power cables. My ASUS Radeon AGP takes Molex power (!) and I stole a Y splitter off my Mac to get extra power to the video card, and now the case won't open … (you can see I don't touch hardware much, or anything made this millennium, I'm an animatronic museum exhibit)
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@Ragnax said:
@blakeyrat said:
Knock it up a notch. Remove the Catalyst manager app (or whatever it's called) completely, and update the driver to the version in Microsoft's repository. Unless you need to do something really funky, like rotate a monitor 90 degrees or have two monitors pretend to be one, you don't need the Catalyst thing at all.
QFT. Blakey's spot on here. The Catalyst Control Center management app is a complete piece of trash. Nine out of ten times it doesn't install correctly or boot up correctly, which results in Windows event logs being hammered with error entries continuously. If you have an ATI card and have noticed that something is continuously accessing your harddrive, then uninstall CCC and enjoy the blisfull silence thereafter.
Unless you are a control freak who wants to tune everything you really don't need CCC for anything. The important stuff can all be configured from Windows' own control panel. Atleast with installing the Catalyst driver through Windows Update you'll get a WHQL-certified driver that ATI had to ship to Microsoft for review. Stands within reason those will have been given a more critical review than the flavor of the week ATI directly puts out on the web. (Oh; and you won't have to deal with yet another 'auto-updater-packaged-into-PoS-customized-installer'.)
Oh yes. And I think I've found at least one reason why it sucks. I recently had a HD-failure and had to reinstall on a fresh disk. ATI HD5770 with catalyst and drivers from 2009 on CD. (Not sure why I installed from CD first instead of downloading directly, I guess I was in the groove of slapping in CDs and didn't think). That driver of course had no openGL-support, so upgrade it was or no minecraft for me.
When I tried upgrading the driver windows (7 x64) bluescreened with the error originating in atiwhatever.sys and upon reboot catalyst was gimped and didn't detect any displays. (Oh, and that bloody overscan-setting is back with its annoying black border. Easily solved but grar!). I rolled back the driver and went online to find out why this happened, and found a certain nugget.. The drivers with openGL-support requires a certain minimum version of catalyst (10.6 iirc). When I did a custom install catalyst wanted to upgrade the drivers first and then itself. So it happily upgraded to an incompatible driver and bluescreened before it could upgrade itself. Billiant depenency handling there. A manual install of only catalyst first and then the driver solved the issue.
(Well, it still bluescreened, but it seems to work when I rebooted, catalyst at least detects my displays now (and I've got my minecraft back \o/))
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@dhromed said:
@Pilsner said:
and I've got my minecraft back \o/
ALL IS WELLMinecraft = Java.
Play a man's game, like Battlefield 3.
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@blakeyrat said:
Play a man's game, like Battlefield 3.
I don't really like real-life wargames.
But maybe I'll consider if the gameplay and narrative are good? Obviously the graphics are.
BRB have to finish my sandstone superstructure. All the way from bedrock up to the sky!
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@blakeyrat said:
@dhromed said:
@Pilsner said:
and I've got my minecraft back \o/
ALL IS WELLMinecraft = Java.
Play a man's game, like Battlefield 3.
This.
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@dr spock said:
@blakeyrat said:
@dhromed said:
@Pilsner said:
and I've got my minecraft back \o/
ALL IS WELLMinecraft = Java.
Play a man's game, like Battlefield 3.
This.
I don't really like real-life wargames.
But maybe I'll consider if the gameplay and narrative are good? Obviously the graphics are.
BRB have to finish my sandstone superstructure. All the way from bedrock up to the sky!
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Double-post two hours apart? I don't think even CS is capable of that kind of WTF-ery.
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@mott555 said:
Double-post two hours apart? I don't think even CS is capable of that kind of WTF-ery.
Oh ye of little faith.
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@mott555 said:
Double-post two hours apart? I don't think even CS is capable of that kind of WTF-ery.
I did it intentionally because I didn't think the message was clear.
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@blakeyrat said:
Nothing played Starsiege: Tribes like a Voodoo III! (And Tribes is the only game that matters.)
YES!In related news, ATI sucks and has for many years (before the AMD purchase, even) - all its sales are to blind fanboys and Linux fangirls who want to use Beryl/Compiz/Whatever its called these days. nVidia is the one and only true video card manufacturer. I haven't updated drivers for my 260GTX and 460GTX-series boards since the OS installs happened - zero compatability issues, zero performance issues.This despite nVidia issuing a driver update every few hours (or so their version numbering would lead you to believe)
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@Weng said:
@blakeyrat said:
Nothing played Starsiege: Tribes like a Voodoo III! (And Tribes is the only game that matters.)
YES!High Rez is taking applications for Tribes: Ascend beta testing, testing starts monday IIRC. Pretty sure it won't run on a Vooduu Three though.
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@SEMI-HYBRID code said:
so it actually doesn't make sense that you (would?) get the option when right-clicking a folder. do you really have the option when clicking on a folder too?
Yes, I do. Or more precisely, I did before throwing it out manually from the registry.
But I'm 100% sure it was on every folder. I wouldn't have minded just the desktop, because that would make sense.
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@topspin said:
@SEMI-HYBRID code said:
so it actually doesn't make sense that you (would?) get the option when right-clicking a folder. do you really have the option when clicking on a folder too?
Yes, I do. Or more precisely, I did before throwing it out manually from the registry.
But I'm 100% sure it was on every folder. I wouldn't have minded just the desktop, because that would make sense.For me, it appears in the context menu of the desktop, and the blank area of any folder window. It does not appear in the context menus for files and folders.
A random aside: in Windows 7, when you click on a program, why does the icon for the "Open" button in the toolbar change to the "what is this i dont even" icon? Why not, oh, the icon of the program, or the generic application icon, or a launch icon? Aren't Microsoft trying any more?
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
For me, it appears in the context menu of the desktop, and the blank area of any folder window. It does not appear in the context menus for files and folders.
Mmm yeah I just checked and it shows for me too when right clicking in the blank area of a folder - although I don't often do that so don't really have an issue with it. But yeah it shouldn't really be there, I guess they did it to get it into the context menu on the desktop (there is probably a desktop specific way to do that).A random aside: in Windows 7, when you click on a program, why does the icon for the "Open" button in the toolbar change to the "what is this i dont even" icon? Why not, oh, the icon of the program, or the generic application icon, or a launch icon? Aren't Microsoft trying any more?
The reason for the "what is this i dont even" icon (I think its called default or system or something), I think relates to the fact that is the icon associated to the exe file type, its just that exe is normally a special case that can have its own icon extracted and used (iirc in previous versions of Windows, the .exe type would show in the file type associations settings, but it doesnt seem to anymore). Not sure why the embedded exe icon doesn't also show on the open button (who even uses that??) - maybe you should submit a bug report...
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.exe simply use "%1" as the icon path. So can any file type, and you can define your own icon handler for any file type, for example Photoshop's awful thumbnail generator (hopefully since Photoshop 7 it no longer tries to pass off a pop-art smudge as a thumbnail).
However, when your developers and testers are all as blind as a bat and with the IQ of a sack of hammers, I don't think bug reports are gonna do any good.
