ATI Catalyst 5.13

[anonymez]

ATI uses the word 'next week' pretty loosely, we'll be seeing the legendary 5.13 drivers on the 22nd. The beta has gotten rave reviews & reportedly blows nvidia out of the water in most areas (including deinterlacing!)

it'll also enable ATI's next-gen technology, AVIVO, geared towards H264 hardware acceleration (using cyberlink's codec) & hardware encoding.

Catalyst 5.13 represents the greatest leap in video quality technology for ATI since the original Mach64-VT. It brings sophisticated diagonal filtering, basic noise reduction, and the ability to detect unusual cadences. ATI marketing told us about "video dominATIon" and we have to agree that Catalyst 5.13 brings ATI to the top of the PC video world.

and its a completely free upgrade, unlike nvidia's purevideo, costing up to $50, which would really hurt after the expense of a 7800GTX.

full review: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...video_quality/

[anonymez]

they've just been released, maybe 1 or 2 hours ago. get them if you have an ATI card

http://www.ati.com

[Chewy]

"full review: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...video_quality/"

300$ plus card vs <150$ card

[anonymez]

true, but the idea is to test the drivers. (also consider the 6600GT is very similar to the 7800GTX in terms of video quality). either way, the PQ improvements should be seen on most ATI cards

[Chewy]

Chewy had some real ISSUES(safe mode/last known) with
catalyst drivers not that long ago, course lots of small ones with nvidia also.

[anonymez]

did chewy uninstall the previous catalyst correctly? its the most common cause of problems with up/downgrading catalyst

Old Catalyst Removal

Now we move on to the simplest, and yet most commonly mishandled part of using graphics drivers - the removal of previous Catalyst drivers. To do this successfully, you need to follow some simple steps which will help guarantee that your installation of the drivers is "clean", and leads to trouble-free performance. I particularly recommend this procedure if you are installing the recent ATI Catalyst Control Center for the first time. To completely remove your existing Catalysts, and all traces of them from your system do the following:

1. Uninstall any existing Catalysts. To do this, go to Control Panel>Add or Remove Programs. Select the 'ATI - Software Uninstall Utility' option if available, and click the Change/Remove button. Follow the prompts from there to uninstall your existing Catalysts, and reboot as prompted. If you have an older version of the Catalysts installed, and can't find the ATI Software Uninstall Utility item, under Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel find the 'ATI Catalyst Control Panel' and/or the 'ATI Catalyst Control Center' item(s) and uninstall them, then find the 'ATI Display Driver' item and uninstall it as well (in that order), rebooting when necessary. If you cannot find any ATI entries, you are probably using the default Windows XP drivers, which means you can skip to the Catalyst Installation section of the guide further below.

2. When you reboot, you will find Windows XP will detect your graphics card as one (or more) new devices. It will then attempt to find appropriate drivers for your card. Cancel out of all such attempts.

3. This step is optional, however it is strongly recommended if you are either (a) downgrading your Catalysts to a previous version, or (b) experiencing problems and want to ensure you have a "clean install" of the Catalysts. Basically the aim is to find all the individual ATI Catalyst driver files and remove them manually. To do this, go to your C:\Windows\System32 and C:\Windows\System32\Drivers directories, and find and delete all files beginning with 'ATI...'. You may notice that some of these files keep recreating themselves - don't worry, these are just the default XP ATI drivers which are protected and can't be permanently deleted. Just delete all the ATI driver files and let XP decide which default files the system should keep. Alternatively you can use the Windows Search function (Start>Search), with the search string ATI*.* to make searching and deletion faster. Importantly however, do not delete the files under the \ServicePackFiles or \Lastgood directories, or under any game or application-specific directories. Just stick to files found under the two directories mentioned earlier. Finally, make sure you delete the entire program folder(s) where you installed the Catalysts. The default install location is C:\ATI and/or C:\ATI Technologies but if you chose another location when installing, go there and delete the folder and all its contents. Also delete the \Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\ATI and \Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\ATI directories if you have previously installed the ATI Catalyst Control Center at any point.

4. This step is optional, but again it is recommended if you want to ensure a "clean install". It involves removing any ATI registry entries left over. To do this, I recommend using either RegSupreme, or its earlier (and completely free) cousin, RegCleaner 4.3. To use RegSupreme, start the program and once it has cached your files, start a 'Deep' scan, then wait and choose the 'All' item under the Select menu to highlight all the 'invalid entries' found, and click the Fix button to remove them all, making sure to save a backup under a descriptive name. To use RegCleaner, open the program and on the front page put a tick next to all the 'ATI'-related entries, and then click the 'Remove Selected' button. If you want to use the Windows XP Registry Editor instead, go to Start>Run and type "RegEdit" (without quotes). Then go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key, select the 'Software' subkey, and scroll down to the 'ATI', 'ATI Technologies' and 'ATI Technologies Inc.' entries. Right-Click on each of these keys and select Delete to remove them. Note that this method is not as thorough as using RegSupreme or RegCleaner, which find other hidden ATI entries.

That should remove all the bits and pieces of old Catalyst drivers and Control Panels which have been installed on your system previously. Of course the quickest method is to just run the ATI Software Uninstall Utility, but as I said, if you're installing the ATI Catalyst Control Centre for the first time, if you have a history of graphical problems, you've installed multiple versions of the Catalysts without a clean out, or you are reverting to an older version of the Catalysts from a newer one, I strongly suggest you follow all four steps above at least once.

[Chewy]

It was the first catalyst + cntrl cntr driver I had problems with
on a DJ/KJ desktop unit. Delete partition worked wonders.
Your above steps, been there, done that, reminds me of some hard
to remove virus.

[anonymez]

lol i've only ever done the method once, and that was because i was downgrading drivers. not needed for upgrading

[tigerman8u]

Am d/l them now. Another ATI software install.

[bill7621]

So now that you all have had this for a week or so, what do you think? I installed it and had some undesirable issues right away so I reverted to the 5.5 that I've had good luck with. I then discovered that it wasn't 5.13 causing my problems. I haven't tried it again, yet! I have a 9600 SE so I don't know if this will benefit my card all that much, if at all.

[anonymez]

they work just fine on my X800XL, haven't noticed anything but improvements in certain games

[bill7621]

I'll give it another go sometime this coming week!

[tigerman8u]

no problems here, so far.