Catalyst 11.6 issues/questions

I am not a big gamer so please don't hold it against me. I mainly use my G73Jh for graphics and 3D rendering.

The last drivers I was using was the Catalyst 10.8. Sketchup 8 pro was working fine, displaying shadows fine. I upgraded to 11.5 and shadows began to display incorrectly. I installed the the 11.5b hotfix which did not solve the problem, so I went back to 10.8 after several attempts to install other legacy ATI drivers.

I also use Maxon Cinema 4D and have had it crash on me on occasion with the 10.8 drivers. Their bug report told me to upgrade to the latest AMD/ATI WHQL ver. 11 or higher drivers.

Looking on the ASUS support site, there is no new drivers posted since I purchased my laptop last year in September.

What should I do? I know the obvious answer would be to try the new 11.6 driver, but should I wait for an 11.6 hotfix or contact Goggle about Sketchup hoping in vain for a solution from them?

Also, can someone tell me if the 11.6 driver I get from AMD/ATI is WHQL? How do I find this out.

Thanks for any advice!

 

WHQL stands for windows hardware quality labs and simply means the driver is approved for windows. Once it's up on AMD's website, it means it is WHQL so go ahead and update from AMD's website. So far, i haven't experienced problems with 11.6 but i don't use the programs you do.

Have you checked to see if other people were experiencing the same problems with sketchup?

So far i haven't see a hotfix and the driver has been out for a couple of days now.

 

You do not mention updating the VBIOS, for the newer drivers to work properly this need to be done on the JH.
There are numerous thread here about this, here is one:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/515309-how-fix-your-gsod-blues.html
(I know you are not getting BSOD, nor was I but the VBIOS update is crucial for the new drivers to work properly)
(Note the VBIOS is not available on the ASUS site) If you need a link let us know)

 

Thanks for the responses. JOSEA, I have updated the VBIOS quite a while ago, and my BIOS is at ver. 213. I also have done pretty much all the Microsoft updates and any other updates in regards to the mentioned pieces of software.

I have read that some people say there is not much in the line of any real fixes for them with regards to the new 11.6 driver. But as I said, I am not a gamer and don't have the issues with respect to games and the GPU.

From what I can find on the net, people have been having issues with various ATI cards and Sketchup display problems. Maybe this is just a new issue to ad to the list? Now the question is who is at fault, who will believe they are at fault, and who will actually do something about it?

 

When you grab Catalyst drivers, make sure they have the openCL support.

 

Hey all I'm new to the forums but I came here looking for help on a long running issue I'm having that is related to these new drivers. It seems to me from my own research that it's a chronic issue that plagues almost all owners of the G73J series which feature the Mobility Radeon HD5870.

I wanted to update to catalyst 11.6 in order to take advantage of OpenCL capabilities. Knowing that updating from stock drivers would cause me a BSOD (from past experience - I had to roll them back), I first updated the vbios successfully (as I hadn't done it before). Then I uninstalled the video display drivers via device manager. I then rebooted and let windows load up the default drivers. Then I installed (apparently successfully, no BSOD) the catalyst 11.6 package, and rebooted the machine. This caused an infuriating issue, wherein I can no longer set the screen resolution to maximum. It will only go as high as 1400x1080 which looks awful, wherein beforehand I could take the card up to 1920x1280 (or whatever it was). Furthermore, some of my games that ran fine before can't reach max resolution either.

Windows doesn't seem to recognize the new drivers - device manager says ATI mobility radeon 5800 series, but it has the yellow exclamation point. On the screen resolution dialog, under advanced settings, adapter type is blank and all the device stats say unavailable or n/a. If I click properties, all it says for device driver is VgaSave, non-plug and play driver. I ran GPU-Z to probe the specs of the card and the info has changed to "5800 series" instead of 5870. Furthermore, before the update it showed that card as DirectCompute enabled , but now it shows no computational protocols enabled. the whole reason I went through this rigamarole in the first place was to get OpenCL support, because when I installed the AMD APP SDK 2.2 with my original drivers, it didn't work - OpenCL was still not available.

It is very very annoying to not be able to update the video drivers on this laptop with ecountering some kind of crazy issue. I suppose my question is, how do I fix this? Is it just not possible to get maximum performance out of this card using anything other that the stock catalyst 10.2 (or whatever they were) drivers? I've heard of G73 owners not having a single issue ever, being able to update drivers perfectly. Bascailly I could use some help here. I'm about to RMA this laptop, even though I know they will probably mess with the bios and possibly put unwanted partitions on my drive. I don't really care. What is goin on with these G73's? I'm at the end of my rope here.

My specs:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
BIOS 211
latest vBIOS
Catalyst 11.6 (previously the original drivers)

 

CropDuster, This can be fixed I believe , NO RMA needed. You need to do a 'clean install' of the ATI drivers.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...st-11-2-mobility-released-get-yours-here.html

See
How to Setup (thanks to steviejones133) in the first post there.
Also where are you getting the ATI driver package from? this is Chastity's now legendary resource page http://www.asusrog.com/forums/showthread.php?1150-G73-Series-Driver-and-Application-Reference
I just wanted to be sure you have the mobility & not the Desktop driver for the 5870M.
Be carefull with Drive sweeper and CC cleaner, they can remove files that are needed to run other applications .

As a side note I would also recommend updating the BIOS to 213 (but this is independent of the driver issue)
If you need more help, post here or send me a private message.

 

JOSEA, thanks for the info. Following these guides and using this software completely corrected my problems, and for the first time since owning this notebook I now have full and updated access to all the features of the Radeon card. ASUS hardware hiccups aside, AMD should be ashamed of themselves for distributing such bloated and messy drivers.