Video Card drivers

I just wanted to create a topic for Acer owners to discuss video card drivers. I currently have an Acer 2012 (with the Radeon 9700) and am running on the stock drivers but definitely want to update them. I read in another thread that the Omega drivers (based on the Cat 4.7's) work well with notebooks so I'm going to give that a go later tonight. Anywho, I hope this can be helpful to some.

-Jesse

 

I tried the Omega drivers and they are working great. No noticeable performance loss in 3DMark01SE and 3DMark03 and the added RadLinker (Overclocking tool) can increase performance. Last night I was able to hit 10,600 in 3DMark01SE and 3,040 in 3DMark03 with just a little bit of tweaking so I could definitely hit 11,000 in 01SE later today (maybe up to 12,000 in the future) and might be able to increase the 03 score to 3,500.

 

Think I posted the info you saw on the omega drivers. Glad to see it worked for someone else as well. Went from a 9900 with stock drivers to 10300 with the omega drivers in 3Dmark01SE. Ran it several times to make sure it was accurate and seems to be. By the way..do you have the 128mB 9700 card in yours? Thats what i have and I was curious if the numbers i was getting were similar to others with the same video card.

 

I've got the 2012 so I only have the 64MB 9700. Looking at some benchmarks, the performance between the 64MB card and the 128MB card are the same until resolution/IQ settings are cranked up.

 

ive got the 128mb 9700 and get an average of 10300. I'm a big overclocker but scared to do so on my laptop.. Think i'll just stick with what i'm getting and not get greedy.

 

Yeah, there really isn't any point in overclocking a laptop, sans the benchmarks. Overclocking affects gaming performance the most and gaming is far from being a notebook's niche. In addition to that, given the tight fit that a notebook has, overclocking can cause a definite heat problem. Personally, when I ran those previously mentioned benchmarks, I OCed the Core frequency from 391MHz to 425MHz (taking small steps of course) and the Memory frequency from 202MHz to 225MHz. No instability, no artifacting (even after having run 3Dmark01SE and 3DMark03 a couple times within a short amount of time). But again, there is no reason for it, at least not for me, so I'm content with the default frequencies but might attempt to hit that 11k in 01SE a bit later.

 

Jesse, what kind of scores are you getting in 3DMark03/01 with Omega 4.7 and no overclocking on your 2012? I've got a 2012 and got around 2500 in 03, can't recall my 01SE score, using the Acer driver. I've yet to try out my newly installed Catalyst 4.7 but hopefully I'll have the time to do it soon.

 

I never ran the tests @ stock frequencies with the Omega Drivers. However, I do recall that my stock Acer drivers scores were something like 9,800 in 01SE and 2,600 in 03 so our systems are definitely comparable. Later today I'll run both tests at stock clocks to see how it goes. Most folks say that actually see a small point drop with the Omegas in the benchmarks but their overall gaming performance goes up. One last thing, could you check your Core and Memory frequencies on your Radeon? Mine has default clocks of 391MHz (Core) and 202.1 (Memory) and those numbers just look awkward to me. Thanks and I'll post the test results later today.

 

Welp the results are as follows:
9949 in 3DMark01SE and
2750 in 3DMark03.
Both are better than the previous times I ran the tests at stock but the improvement could be contributed to "burning in" the entire system. Either way, it shows that the Omega drivers are definitely up to the task.