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ATI video card owners (me included), let's just face it — ATI's only video driver and CCC developer seems to be too busy upgrading his video card to fix the ongoing issues which people are reporting all over the Internet, and to keep them from creeping back in.

You think I am being harsh? Nah, I am just sick and tired of regressions. Every time I install new video driver version, something that worked before becomes broken.

For example, in version 10.4 DXVA worked (at least in Windows XP). In all later versions up to and including 10.7 (which supposedly brings DXVA support for VLC player version 1.1.1), DXVA doesn't work, and it can obviously crash your computer if you dare to use it.

As if breaking things is not enough, ATI, once bragging about superior IQ compared to NVIDIA, now has worse image quality in their latest product line and drivers than NVIDIA's two generations old hardware and driver combination:

If that is high-quality anisotropic filtering on a high-end product, then someone please call Canadian equivalent of British ASA. And yes, you can also see the effect of poor man's anisotropic filtering in motion — I didn't pay for high-end product to look at that irritating shimmering.

Last drop however is anti-aliasing — yes, it doesn't work either, especially if you turn off Catalyst A.I. which is the only way to reduce filtering optimizations and thus reduce that annoying shimmering. You can sort of force super-sampling AA, but performance is abysmal, and many games show excessive blurring even with 2xSSAA setting.

I am going to conclude this software rant by pointing out that for all the shenanigans NVIDIA pulled off in the past few months, they still have superior image quality compared to ATI's crap.

UPDATE:

A friend who owns ATI 5870 HD informed me that there is yet another way to crash your ATI drivers (Catalyst 10.7) in Windows 7 x64 — download and run TessMark 0.2.2 (OpenGL 4 Tesselation Benchmark). Author of the tool says:

*** WARNING ***: there is a BUG in Catalyst 10.7 that prevents use of OpenGL 4 GPU tessellation on all Radeon HD 5800. Other Radeon like HD 5700 are not affected by this bug.

TessMark's author says that you may get corrupted rendering, but apparently you can also get a driver crash.

First ATI's hardware tessellation implementation surfaced way back in October 2001 on Radeon 8500 under the name TruForm. It never really took off with game developers because there was no API support.

Hardware tessellation was reintroduced 5 years later (2006) in R600 GPU (HD 2000/3000 series), again without major API (DirectX/OpenGL) support. Ever since then, ATI has been bragging about tessellation and how it will make our games look better with little or no performance penalty.

Back in April 2010, ATI declared themselves first with top-to-bottom OpenGL 4.0 and 3.3 support on Windows and Linux platforms. Few days later, an ex-writer for the UK tech tabloid The Inquirer and an avid NVIDIA hater / ATI fanboy Charlie Demerjian bashes NVIDIA for missing OpenGL 4.0 promise while praising ATI and not allowing any negative comments on ATI driver quality on his website's forum.

Fast forward to today, and ATI still does not have fully working OpenGL 4.0 drivers for their flagship product line with OpenGL 4.0 being just another thing that doesn't work. As expected, Charlie Demerjian still praises ATI and bashes NVIDIA.