New Dell drivers?

Anyone have any clue when Dell plans on releasing any new ATI drivers for the R2 5870's? Im still on 8.7 that are on the dell site from the whole vbios BSOD fiasco back in sept of 2010. Why doesnt Dell come out with new drivers when ATI drops new ones? Will any driver not released by Dell cause problems with the Vbios they had to update? Im sure everyone is asking the same question i have been since i bought by alienware. Why does a 3000+ dollar product not perform like a 3000+ product? Anyways...any insight is apreciated.

 

Manufacturers tend to be slow with driver updates unless there is a major issue. I'm still using Dell's drivers but I understand many are using AMD's Catalyst 10.12 drivers which are the most up to date with few to no problems.

The main difference between AMD/ATI releasing drivers and Dell releasing drivers is that AMD is just making a reference driver that should work on all models relatively well. Dell, or any other OEM, has to optimize the driver for a very specific piece of hardware in a very specific model of computer (and they have to do this for EVERY different model out there, or at least the different cards).

 

i heard rumors you can just install the 10.12 package right on top of older versions instead the unistill, reboot, install method. Any truth to that?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...e-drivers-now-out-discussion-thread-here.html

Note that there may be sleep issues with that driver.

This is also usually a note in the ATI Catalyst updates stating that switchable graphics integrated with Intel chipsets aren't supported or compatible (in other words, ours):

It's in 10.12 too.

 

R1 users are in the same situation with Dell and our nVidia drivers..as long as their pockets get full of $€£ they don't seem to care that our machines don't run at optimal parameters!
Sad but this is what we understand when no new actions are taken.I would prefer they release lesser revisions but stable then a lot and very buggy.

 

Manufacturers of computer systems often don't see supporting most end-user/consumer systems more often than a 3-6 month cycle. After about a year or the next product release they taper off or completely stop driver support. This is very common. A large part is about the money, but that is partly because it costs them a significant amount of capital for each system.

Each system model typically requires a different set of optimized and thoroughly tested drivers. Even 'identical' models that have all the same hardware may have small deviances in manufacturing process or product run that causes unique but reproducible errors in software. A manufacturer has to test and modify drivers for every single variant as possible in order to maintain drivers and support.

Remember, the drivers that AMD/NVidia/etc release are only reference drivers, they aren't meant as the end-all be-all. When it comes to laptops, it becomes even more difficult for the reference drivers to support most of them because the hardware and the way the motherboard interacts with that hardware can vary widely. Laptop video cards interface with the PCIe bus interface for the most part but the ways that they do can vary widely, with MXM an attempt at standardizing the system.

Almost all AMD video driver release contain this disclaimer:

That covers a very large portion of the notebook market, including ours.