Official Catalyst 9.8 are out!

New catalysts are leaked (the official version and not the beta version). You can download them here.

Note: As i said those are the official drivers and not beta, but you cant download them from amd's site yet (probably monday).

Heres the change log:

And of course OpenGL 3.1 support

ATI released 9.8 hotfix

Nothing interesting except if you play these four games they had issues. What they fixed is:

* No Anti-Aliasing support for Ghostbusters
* Graphics corruption when playing Sims 3
* No support for CrossfireX when playing Resident Evil 5.
* Company of heroes crashes when playing at Ultra settings

Links for XP/Vista/Windows 7 can be found here.

 

oh man i wish i had my whitebook to test these new drivers. it seems promising.

 

Just broke my 3dmark record lol. 13211 (stock settings of course). Gonna test CoH later on, so far so good to be honest, no issues at all

 

What about FPS's? Also heat, has it gone down for the cards? Plus when I click on the link it says page not found

 

Link worked for me just fine.

 

Links work fine here. Temps at the moment are 51c (idle) and 83c at load which are kinda lower than my previous 9.7's.

Havent test a lot of games yet since ive only installed them 20mins ago but so far Quake, 3dmark, Vantage, CS,CSS, Cod4 seems to be just fine. As i said gonna check CoH later, sadly i dont have the other games installed at the moment but im pretty sure someone will benchmark them for you

 

Ok so while I know people SWEAR that you HAVE to UNINSTALL, and DRIVER SWEEPER your computer when updating your video card drivers, and I KNOW that you absolutely HAVE to do this when you downgrade your drivers for sure. Is it really ABSOLUTELY necessary to uninstall and run driver sweeper on your computer when you upgrade your drivers?

I only ask because ever since 9.4 drivers came out, I've simply Mob Modded the next set of drivers (9.5, 9.6, and 9.7) and then installed them without doing the tedious process of uninstalling, reboot into safe mode, driver sweeper, reboot, install, and its always seem to work just fine for me, no problems whatsoever.

I would never not driver clean if I was downgrading, but what's the reason for doing it when upgrading too?

 

Not really, its not that necessary. Ive installed quite a few times the drivers without uninstalling the old ones. But if you get some strange problems with games etc, just do a "proper" reinstallation, if not no harm no foul

 

Excellent, I'd heard these were due yesterday due to some big gaming convention in the US. Will download and get these driver modded before I do my re-benching

 

Sigh, Company of heroes ingame benchmark is useless. I mean they could easily made a small demo of the game with explosions and so on and not just a video using the game engine. Seems like whatever settings i use i always get 60fps (vsync is on) wheres in multiplayer with 2-8 players and the amount of explosions in those game thats not the case

 

Thanks. Downloading them now, gonna see if they help much with my 3870s. The Crysis improvements appear to be very promising.

 

Wow, nice little boost in 3DMark06. Went from 13624 to 13850 (stock, no OC) just by updating drivers.
http://service.futuremark.com/home.action;jsessionid=82F235B2E3468ED360F7AD64F0C0EAF3

 

I'm seeing a nice little boost in CoD4 but it already ran plenty fast enough. I'll give Crysis Warhead a shot later and see if it's improved any.

 

These seem like good drivers in the mainstay, they've also fixed the performance of the DX10 RE5 benchmark BUT unfortunately it now conflicts a little and the bench seems to freeze up part way through run.

Once they've got that sorted in a revision or two, the DX10 RE5 should be pretty damned playable; I mean to give the extent of the changes, section 3 of the DX10 Variable Benchmark now runs about twice the speed of the DX9 version, at 45-60fps in comparison to previous 25-30!

 

About to benchmark Crysis (if it works; someone suggested playing through the first level first to get it to work) but I can already tell it makes a difference. I just played 15 minutes through the first level of Crysis, 1440x900 and on High (DX9, seeming as I don't see a difference in DX10) and it barely ever dropped below 30FPS.

EDIT: Still can't get the bloody benchmark tool to work. Always just loads up the first level.

 

Same issue Evil, just tried that myself. Im able to run 1920x1200 at about 20-25fps which is nice though, not sure if a quad would help at all here if clocked decently; but grabbing an QX9300 to find out would be silly; and a little pointless; my X9100 handles about anything out well

 

I ran all my benchmarks with the 9.8s on vista and i didnt see any improvements over the 9.7s . Most of the listed improvements will come with the new cards and also unrealistic situations IE Crysis @2560x1600 with 16aa will see a 36% improvement , they just never add that part to the release notes .

I can run the crysis benchtool without issue so not sure whats going on with you guys .

 

im using 9.8.
havnt really seen a difference though in performance.

 

It probably just increases 4000 series performance then. (Like the 9.7s)

Nice to keep updated though.

 

The 4 series use far more shaders etc; a lot of the benefit with newer drivers probably comes down to forcing more effective use of the shaders, apart from new/improved crossfire profiles and multiCPU optimisations *due to the way they work ATIs shader designs have higher theoretical shader performance than Nvidia's, but its harder to get that performance out of them*, which won't affect the 3 series anywhere near as much as for one they've already spent the last year or two optimising with those two cards; but also the shader count from series 3 to 4 was something along the lines of 300 to 800; so a massive amount more potential but again, not always easy to get the performance from.

IIRC the reason for this is that ATI uses a fewer number of full shaders, but each is paired with about 5 specifically tasked sub-shaders. Get all of these going and your shader performance is...well through the roof, this is one of the reason ATI Edge Detect AA works so well for older games which dont use use heavy shader performance, as the spare power is utilised to run a secondary AA, which is then run through the AA Hardware resolve; resulting in a 1.5-2x effective boost in AA (2x becomes comparable to 4x etc), however in average use; its very tricky to keep every sub-shader fully utilised; thus a lot of power can be wasted.

 

Thanks for the link!
WTH, didn't 9.7 come out pretty recently? Such support from ATI, while definitely appreciated, seems a bit odd.

 

Hmm.. Anyone able to upload a modded version someplace? I'm wondering if this might fix my issue I have with HAWX. Couldn't hurt anyway. Oh and reason I ask about a modded version is I have very limited bandwidth and they also limit the amount of data I can upload/download per day. =(

Currently only have 100M bit total per day.

EDIT: And yes, it's in bits not Bytes.. =(

 

The drivers themselves were 99 Mbytes to download.

 

What OS are you running kachooo ? Uploading my Vista32bit package on megaupload now (48mb).

 

I'm running Vista 64. Sorry, suppose I should have mentioned that. heh.

I knew the drivers alone were about 100mb but I've been stupid and havent' downloaded any mod tools so.. =P

 

You only need mobility modder which is like 2mbs

So its basically 63mb for the drivers and 2 for the modder.

Btw, you said 100 megabits ? Thats 12.5 megabytes

 

Yeah I said bits Though it seems like sometimes I can get a bit more through. The internet here is total crap and for that amount of data/day is like 60$/month. I do however have other ways of getting around it but it's much much slower.

 

hi all could any of you that have got this installed post a pic of the driver sig and stuff as when i try to install 9.8 my laptop flashes like mad.

Driver Packaging Version 8.634-090714a-085036E-ATI
Provider ATI Technologies Inc.
2D Driver Version 8.01.01.921
2D Driver File Path /REGISTRY/MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet001/Control/CLASS/{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}/0002
Direct3D Version 8.14.10.0678
OpenGL Version 6.14.10.8793
Catalyst™ Control Center Version 2008.1209.2131.38627

thats what i got?

is it right ....thanks all

 

Here you go

Seems like your installation was unsuccessful, did you mod if properly ?

 

mmmm must have done summet wrong cheers bud, least now i know what im looking for

 

Cool, I just re-ran Vantage with 9.8 and got a couple of hundred points higher than the 9.7 driver.

 

What score you pushing now? About 9.5k GPU?

 

Yeah, my best run was 9.6. I was getting 9.4 before.

 

Better than nothing

 

Speaking of which, I tried to do my part as an advocate for the 3870 owners today. I happened to be on the phone with AW tech support to order an extra part and asked them about this upgrade for existing owners. Again, they said it will be offered, but they want to make sure they have enough stock for new M17 orders first. This is in order to reduce their inventory of M17s. I don't know how much good it will do, but I voiced my support for the existing owners to be treated right and get the upgrades.

 

Thanks for trying to help out on the upgrade front JasonNH i know i want a set for sure . +Rep

 

Thanks, Jason for the help, unfortunately I have two obstacles ahead of me. 1. Need to wait for AW to sell them as upgrades, and 2. I'm holding on to a whitebook

*sigh*

 

quadzilla howd you get on budany luck!!!!

also cannot load 9.8 onto 4850s im even using mobility modder new virsion.

any ideas

you can tell ive been drinking ^^^^

 

Lol

If you modded them properly and tried installing them after a cleaning your system check with the other 4850's users to see if its a common issue with the 9.8's. If not then we can start troubleshooting the issue

 

All I did was download 9.8, begin install, quit after extraction, mobility mod the 9.8 directory, and then install from the modded 9.8 directory. Worked fine first try without uninstalling the previous driver.

 

Apparently it didnt work fine since it didnt install anything as you can see from the software versions

 

Well, it did on my 4850's.

 

Ah sorry, confused you with kcuk (didnt remember who had the issue).

But never the less, drivers sometimes conflict, so if you have a problem with drivers failing to install etc its wise to do a proper clean up then try to install the new ones.

 

lol thanks for helping all, ill get their in the end hopefully!!!

 

After my m17 decided to stop working => bosd, I reinstalled Windows 7 and 9.8 so I'll start testing them again

Greetings
Julian

 

Theres a hotfix for the 9.8, info added to the first post.

 

Aye, was about to add this too, but you're 20 minutes early
It completely cures the RE5 bugs Im happy to report; I've uploaded a new pic in my 4850x2 benchmark thread.

Recommended driver update

 

Picture update for those that want to be sure the drivers installed properly.

 

Hey has anyone tried to overclock mobility 3870s with the new 9.8 drivers? I tried programs from AMD Clock Tool to tray tools and none of them work.

 

If you really want to, try GPU Tool beta 0.01 or whatever its called from TechPowerup.