Hi.

I'm hoping that someone here knows the answer. Are there any good stereoscopic drivers that work with the Radeon 9700, along the lines of the ones Nvidia have for their hardware? The Nvidia stereo support is very good, but the 9700 card is a lot faster I'd like to use an ATI card for a particular application I have, and also for playing games on, but I need stereo drivers, dammit!

pca

A quick search on Rage3d's forums only really turned up that thread asking for it. Someone states they have it working fine on their 8500, but beyond that, most of the thread is people saying yes ATI should write them, or no, it's up to the glasses maker.

Maybe Bruno could shed some light on this

I'll try to remember to ask on Monday... But it's going to be easier if Patrick just writes to me as a reminder...

Bruno

My experience of ATI matches the consensus over at www.avsforum.com - great cards crippled by sucky driver support. If nVidia had given their cards 10bit DACs and an electrically clean output, then the HTPC crowd would have probably dropped ATI in a heartbeat. nVidia has a reputation for producing timely drivers that support their hardware well whereas ATI drivers take an age to mature before they actually make good use of the HW.

Now if only ATI's hardware engineers and nVidia's software engineers would all jump ship and form their own company we'd be set.

What little people on the outside know about NVIDIA drivers or ATI drivers for that matter. Hearsay goes a long way I suppose. Unfortunately it takes time to get away from it, but we're working on it. I don't think there's a website out there that has not given the new cards and drivers a glowing review.

Our products are a lot more diverse than NVIDIA's, and we write a lot more software. You can add whatever filters you'd like to an NV card as well as a 10 bit DAC (HTPC crowd wouldn't know a 10bit DAC if it bit them on the nose) and they'd still be left with an inferior video solution with crippled DVD playback capabilities by comparison.

If anyone has a right to comlain about bugs in driver software, I'm sure the HTPC crowd should be the last on the list. Driver problems and bugs have been a lot more common on the 3D front than anything else.

You'd be pleased to know that software quality has always been a priority at ATI. However, now it's being brought to the forefront along with a marketing push. The company is actively promoting its software and positioning it as a notable portion of the product line. The new line of cards are feature-complete for Windows. AFAIK, the public is still waiting on final release of DX9 though.

Bruno

But of course my opinions are biased.

My problem with ATI drivers has always been that they have to be so gaudy. Why can't they just sit back in the display options like everyone else's? Why must we have a tray icon with an ugly UI rife with huge fonts subverting every aspect of the Windows UI ``standards''? (I have to admit that I haven't dealt with an ATI card under Windows in a year or so, so this may have changed, but it's been more-or-less that way since Windows 3.0, IIRC.)

The tray icon has little (nothing) to do with the "drivers" themselves. The tray applet is ties to the desktop properties extensions, but you don't have to run anything in the tray. I can't speak for the design of the tray icon and its associated launcher icons, nor the interfaces for the rest of the Windows software. If that were my job, it would all look quite a bit different and you'd have nothing but praise for it. But that's because I'm a perfectionist. Likely the projects would all be over-budget and over-schedule. Seriously though, I'm very much into interface design, but that's not my job at ATI.

I do think that the majority of computer users like gaudy however. You have to see some of the skins and desktops people are running in other applications. Not to mention all the freaks around the world who run their task bars at the bottom of the screen! That's just wrong.

Bruno

The tray icon has little (nothing) to do with the "drivers" themselves.

I realize that, but you can't get one without the other, so it's kind of a moot point.

You can completely remove the desktop properties extension program (sorry, don't know what the thing is actually called ) and not touch the drivers. You'll still have acceleration. At least you did with all the driver's I've been running. Also, without that removal step, you can simply turn off the tray icon and all other desktop-visible signs. And still keep the drivers as well as the extensions to the desktop properties (settings | advanced). Do you think I'd be running my desktop with all sorts of tray icons? Please. I keep 3.. Dialup Network connection, Trillian and sound.

I hope someone would be smacked if you couldn't turn stuff like that off. Now, I know of other software where you don't get that flexibility...

Bruno

Ok, I stated my opinion, you stated yours...

but to get back on topic:


Are there any good stereoscopic drivers that work with the Radeon 9700 (..?)

If anyone has a right to comlain about bugs in driver software, I'm sure the HTPC crowd should be the last on the list. Driver problems and bugs have been a lot more common on the 3D front than anything else.

Well, the HTPC crowd has a good reason to complain. The install. I just reformatted my media PC containing an AIW Radeon, Remote Wonder, and 5.1 compliant sound card. The biggest pain in the ass came when I wanted to install all the ATI components. Had I used the horribly outdated CD that came with the card, it would have been fine. But I choose to download everything from the web. This resulted in:

1. Drivers for the card
2. Control panal for the card
3. Capture drivers for the card
4. MultiMedia Center
5. DVD player
6. Remote Wonder 1.1 drivers
7. Remote Wonder 1.2 upgrade
8. Direct X 8.1
9. MS WMP7 Codecs

Because I had 9 different things to install with no real order stated anywhere, I spent two hours getting it all working togther. Even though I seemed to install it all in the correct order, the TV related components of the AIW all showed up as unknown hardware. The solution? Well ATI files just said reinstall the capture drivers. I tried that 4 times. Finally something kicked in somewhere and installed the card properly.

The setup works great just like it did in the past, but I don't dare touch the drivers again. Please, get the software teams to get togther and write a wrapper installer like what is included on the CD. Sure, it would increase their workload a bit every driver revision, but it would decrease the time it takes ATI customers to get their AIW systems working.

Also, get the driver teams to bundle the damn control panals back in the drivers. They require each other, and should have never been seperated.

The tray applet is ties to the desktop properties extensions, but you don't have to run anything in the tray.

No, but every single time the drivers are updated (and thats been happening quite a bit on the 9700 side), the tray icon shows it's face again, along with the "How to hook your high resolution card to a low resolution POS TV" help files for 2 reboots. If I uncheck something, I expect it to stay that way across upgrades. My sound drivers for my Shuttle have never restored the system tray icon even after 4 driver upgrades.

I know it's not your job to work on these components, but it would be appreciated if you tormented the people who do work on these in the cafeteria or something

I know it's not your job to work on these components, but it would be appreciated if you tormented the people who do work on these in the cafeteria or something.

Maybe that's the problem! Start by telling them to write software at their desks, not while eating. Does the cafeteria serve alcohol?

You'd be pleased to know that software quality has always been a priority at ATI.

Does anyone remember the old days? When ATI and Diamond were the only two real games in town for video cards? And Diamond had the awful crappy drivers while ATI's were always rock-solid and loaded with options?

I always bought Number Nine cards in those days. I avoided Diamond (which is one of the companies that eventually became SonicBlue) because they used nonstandard S3 chips and Linux wouldn't work on them. I avoided ATI because that was right about the time of the reports that they were smoking monitors.

I avoided ATI because that was right about the time of the reports that they were smoking monitors.

Aw, too bad. Because the very reason they were smoking monitors (they allowed people to set funky refresh rates, even on monitors that didn't support funky refresh rates), were what made their drivers so cool. If your monitor supported it, you could do stuff that other cards could not.

It wasn't just timings that were smoking monitors. It was invalid signals, even when the drivers were configured properly. No one 'fessed up to this, so no one knows if it was a broken driver issue or a brokern firmware issue.

I was working technical support for Nokia monitors at the time, so I know what I'm talking about. Plus, I was running Linux a lot, and XFree86 (the de-facto standard GUI for x86 Unices) allowed you to twiddle with timings way more than anyone's Windows driver, plus it allowed you to configure the scan rates of which your monitor was capable, so even if you plugged in a timing that would have smoked your monitor, it noticed and refused to do it, which is something that no Windows driver of the time would do. Not to mention being able to use non-standard resolutions, etc.