System Restore Saves the Day!

Microsoft System Restore
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-SG/windows7/products/features/system-restore

This has been in system a long time ago, since XP perhaps. While most of the time, we only hear about how this feature waste space and cause delay during installation, we had totally forgotten when it would become useful.

In fact, for me, even in the days of Windows 8.1, this feature prove to be useful. What actually happened to me was that I was migrating one of my PC from a ATI (AMD) graphics card to a Nvidia one.

 

It is no surprise that ATI and Nvidia driver would not play nice together. The fatal mistake was however my own. I had forgotten to remove the old ATI driver before shutting down and plug in my Nvidia card. After testing, I wanted to change back to my ATI card and this time, even when I remember to uninstall the Nvidia driver, it just give me the famous "Black Screen of Death" at the Windows 8 login. I had tried reinstalling the ATI driver (but it won't install when the Nvidia card is in) and install-remove the Nvidia driver, but it just wont boot up when the ATI card is in, but perfectly OK on the Nvidia. I guess it could be a "feature" so that you won't switch back to your own card... LOL

Anyway, in the end, during the boot option, I click "Advance Option" and decided to try a System Restore, fortunately was just before the swap since the Direct X was updated. Guess, what? It solved all the issue and I got it up on the very next reboot (even though System Restore did took a while).

So, ask yourself is that little bit more of HDD space worth it? To me, definitely, since HDD space is cheap nowadays and System Restore actually manages itself not to overuse the space anyway. And one thing is for sure, I would add more restore point in the future. And lastly, Thanks Microsoft for implementing this nice feature! 

AMD Catalyst 11.4 installation failed. ATI Display Driver could not be installed.

Yes, it looks like AMD had fucked up again with the release. Even though they had taken a long time to release their drivers, they still did not get it right, at least for me. The ATI Display driver had failed to installed for my HD 6950. I had tried to removed all drivers, reinstalled etc yet nothing works. I am about to give up and roll back to 11.3 when I thought there might had been a hotfix. For AMD, there are usually some hotfix because some card just could not install the driver here and then. And I was right.

Download the Catalyst 11.4c hotfix here:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst114cHotfix.aspx

Despite the descriptions saying that it remove some flickering in some games as below:
Resolves intermittent flickering issues seen in the following applications in a system using an AMD Radeon™ HD 6600 series graphics card with DDR3 memory and running in DirectX® 9 mode:

• Civilization 5
• Dead Rising 2
• Fallout 3
• Mafia 2
• NBA 2K10
• ShenGuiChuanQi
• Starcraft 2
• Warcraft III
• World of Warcraft

I found that the driver somehow works for me this time. Thank goodness I did not need to roll back my drivers. I hope AMD gets it right in 11.5.

ATI Catalyst 10.4 Released

After some BETA and testing from various parties, Catalyst 10.4 is finally out for all cards. At the moment where I am writing, there are some errors with the asp scripts on www.amd.com which prevents some users from accessing the drivers. But fear not, I have a working link here:

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx

Just choose the version you require to download. Hydravision and other utilities has also been upgrade to 10.4 here.

ATI Catalyst 10.1 10.2 Control Center does not work

After some digging and checking, I found out the real cause of one of the machine where the following symptoms exist:

There is no errors in installation on Catalyst 10.x. There is a Catalyst Control Center shortcut when you right click on desktop, but when you click it, nothing happens.

If you have the above, you may have the same problem as me.

Are you using a 64 bits OS? Have you previously installed a lower version Catalyst, such as 9.x or below?

Well, if your answer is yes to the above, it is VERY likely you have the same problem as me.

The problem lies in the bad uninstallation. In drivers before 10.x, there drivers were not properly written and installed as 64 bits software. Therefore, you will see some ATI folders and files in the "Program Files(x86)" directory. Inside there includes the faulty Catalyst Control Center. No matter how you reinstall your 10.x driver, it will go to the 64 bits directory "Program Files" instead and is never properly registered to run.

In case you still have no idea what I am talking about. You can do this to solve the problem:
1. Uninstall Catalyst completely.
2. Boot to saf mode if necessary
3. Remove the ATI directories in Program Files(x86) and in Program Files.
4. Remove ATI registry entries from both HKLM and HKCU.
5. Reboot and reinstall.

I can't believe it is such a screw up that had wasted so much of my time trying to troubleshoot this. I suggest a more through testing from ATI part for different scenarios for this installation which in the first place is already not a very clean solution and is often broken...

ATI Catalyst 10.3 is released

At the same time, for those using HD 2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx card, you may get a "No compatible hardware found" error during the installation of the original driver. In this case, you will need to download the "hotfix" from:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/CatalystAGPHotfix.aspx

The other users can download the original driver from:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

The changes made for 10.3 includes:

Performance improvements

Aliens vs. Predator

Overall performance increases 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Battleforge

Improves up to 8% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Call of Duty: World at War

Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Company of Heroes

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Crysis and Crysis Warhead

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Devil May Cry 4

Improves up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

DiRT 2

Improves up to 30% on ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 20% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Far Cry 2

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2

Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Call of Pripyat Benchmark

Improves up to 10% with Anti-Aliasing enabled on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Clear Sky

Improves up to 2% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products

Resident Evil 5

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

Improves up to 15% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 20% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Unigine Tropics

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

World in Conflict

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Wolfenstein

Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

New Features

ATI Catalyst™ support for ATI Mobility Radeon™ Premium Graphics solutions

This release of ATI Catalyst™ introduces support for the production version of Windows® 7 and Windows® Vista for notebooks featuring the ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 2000 Series, ATI Mobility™ Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4000 Series, and ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5000 Series of products.

Supported by most major OEM and ODM notebook manufacturers

ATI Catalyst Control Center - ATI Eyefinity technology enhancements

Display Bezel Compensation

Easy-to-use wizard shows users how to adjust their display layout to remove the pixels occupied by their display bezels
AMD has updated it’s Direct3D (Quad buffer support) driver to enable 3rd party middleware vendors such as DDD and iZ3D to output stereo L/R images at 120 Hz (60 Hz per eye)

Per-Display Color Adjust

Individual Color, Brightness and Contrast controls
Multiple ATI Eyefinity Groups

Create more than one ATI Eyefinity group from multiple displays
Improved Display Configuration switching

Support for ATI Eyefinity groups and the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center profile manager
Easy to toggle between cloned and extended desktop modes
ATI Catalyst™ support for 3D Stereoscopic

ATI Catalyst 9.8 is out!

Though these drivers are not yet available on the official download page, Over at Quakecon Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton released Catalyst 9.8 drivers.
According to the latest info, with this driver, you should see significant performance increases on AMD platforms.
These improvements are more platform related – you will see gains of up to 50% in some titles (like Far Cry 2) when using a CrossFire solution with 4870 X2 or other 4xxx series in resolutions 16x10 and higher – you’ll see these gains mostly in CPU-bound situations. You will also see significant improvements in titles like HAWX, Crysis, Company of Heroes and World in Conflict.

• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Windows 7 and Vista (64-bit)
• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Windows 7 and Vista (32-bit)
• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Windows XP (32-bit)
• ATI Catalyst 9.8 Windows XP (64-bit)

ATI Catalyst 9.5 Suite is out!

Finally, after the long wait. I found this from the TechPowerUp website with direct links to all version of hte Catalyst 9.5 drivers. If you has read my previous post you will know that mainly the upgrade is necessary for anyone on the HD 4770 cards and using crossfire. I am installing right now. Hope this finally fixes the issues.

ATI Catalyst 9.5 for Windows XP 32-bit Windows XP 64-bit Windows Vista/7 32-bit Windows Vista/7 64-bit

Update : Works perfectly with CrossFire. After reboot, automatically enabled. Yeah, kicks some ass in Furmark with 150 fps and COH with 70fps average :)

ATI Crossfire X Issue with Vista 64 bits 6GB RAM

I was very vert disappointed with ATI driver support. Although they only comes out once per month or less, their drivers are much more unstable as compared to Nvidia's which I think we have at least 1 or 2 per week. I wonder just how much differences are there in the 2 teams in terms of skills and number.

Anyway, I realized that even till today's Catalyst 9.4, the Radeon HD 4770 is not supported fully. For Windows 7, its a total no go, although there is article that mention that HD 4770 drivers will be build in in the final release:

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13231&Itemid=1

I have RC release and it is not at all supported for now.

The biggest issue comes when people like me tries to be powermongy about the graphics card. The (in)famous CrossFire X(tm) configuration. As you can see from this review:

http://en.expreview.com/2009/04/28/first-look-at-radeon-hd-4770-crossfire-benchmark.html

There is definitely a reason why I should go for a 2xHD4770 CrossFire X instead of the HD4890 or HD4870.

The big problem is that CrossFire X is not really supported well on Vista 64 or 6GB of RAM in any order or both, which I have. After staring for it and getting blue screens plus "incompatible display" error 43, I got pointed to a "special" driver by a friend from some hardware benchmark site. Thanks again, and I respect your request not to mentioned who and which site you are from.

In any case, there is a beta driver which works in the above configuration from here:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU-6-HotfixthatfixesErrorCode.aspx

I hope this post helps any of your out there with Error 43 and CrossFire X issues.

Britannica Upgrading to Vista

Finally I had enough of running the trial on the old hardware on Britannica. Its time for an upgrade and that includes these parts :

1. Motherboard (478 to 775)
2. CPU (P4HT to Core2Duo)
3. RAM (DDR to DDR2)
4. Graphics (AGP GeForce 6600GT to PCI-X GeForce 7900GS)

So that ends up me with the following hardware :

1. Asus P5B-VM
2. Core 2 Duo 6400
3. Kingston 2x1GB DDR2 667
4. Leadtek PX 7900GS

Well, how does it fair? Fantastic. I just need to get some time to run benchmarks. BTW, does benchmarks works in Vista? Hehe, I got a Vista benchmark of 5.1 now!