Good news for ATI videocard owners who have been struggling with gray lines, vertical corruption, and other unpleasantries. AMD has released its Catalyst 10.2 package, and if the company follows through on its promise, these look to take things a little more seriously.

The latest release resolves a number of issues for a variety of Windows operating systems, just a handful of which include:

• System will no longer freeze while accessing the UVD Decoder (all Windows OSes)
• System no longer fails and screen distortion no longer visible during Blu-ray content playback with 1680x1050 (Windows 7)
• Resume playback after sleep or hibernation no longer causes green block corruption on video (Windows Vista)
• Changes to the AVIVO gamma settings during Blu-ray HD playback are not retained after closing and restarting player (Windows XP)

Performance improvements include up to 8 percent in Dirt 2 on ATI HD 5970, 5800, and 5700 series cards, 6 percent in Battleforce for HD 5870 CrossFire, and 4 percent in Chronicles of Riddick.

Release Notes (PDF)
Download Link

Image Credit: ATI

AMD over the weekend released a new Catalyst 10.1 hotfix intended to alleviate the "gray screen and vertical line corruptions that may randomly appear during normal usage when using an ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics card."

In the last couple of weeks, some users have flocked to AMD's user forums to complain about gray screens, crashes, hangups, and other quirks associated with their swank new 5800 series videocards, although a few users also mentioned AMD's HD 4xxx series.

When we first reported the problem, ATI got in touch with us and said it was aware of the issue, noting that "initial tests indicate that a driver hotfix resolves" the problem and that it would be made available shortly.

You can download the hotfix, which is available for Windows 7, Vista, XP, and XP Media Center, right here.

If you’re the type that obsessively updates your video drivers, you might also be the type that likes to overclock your video card. Those predilections certainly didn’t you well this week if you run Nvidia cards. The GeForce 196.21 drivers released this week caused overclocking software to stop working. 

The glitch affected multiple tweaking apps like RivaTuner, EVGA Precision, and Galaxy MagicPanel HD. In some cases only the shader clock could not be set. In the more severe cases, shader, memory, and core clocks were all locked. At first, there was fear that this was an intentional move by Nvidia to limit user tweaks. Nvidia quickly cleared the whole matter up though. The problem is just a software bug and there will be an updated driver available soon.
 
Have you updated to the 196.21 drivers? Any problems?

Windows 7 is more stable and responsive than Vista, but no operating system is perfect (the same goes for the drivers and apps running on it). We show you a suite of tools built into Microsoft’s shiny new OS to help you troubleshoot your Windows 7 issues.

Go here to read the rest: 
Troubleshooting Windows 7 With Microsoft’s Built-In Tools

AMD the other day announced the availability of its ATI Catalyst Software Suite 9.12, though there doesn't appear to be a whole lot that's new in the updated driver package.

Catalyst 9.12 brings full support for DirectCompute 10.1 for the Radeon HD 4800 and 4700 series in both single card and CrossFireX configurations. The new driver package also ushers in OpenGL 3.2 extension support for the Radeon HD 5800 series and on down to the 2000 series.

Other than that, there's a couple of performance boosts, including up to a 9 percent gain in 3DMark Vantage benchmarking, and as much as a 6 percent gain in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat in single card configurations.

Catalyst 9.12 resolves several niggling issues in Windows 7, including fixing a corruption issues with some DX9 apps when AA 8X is enabled, and playing back Blu-ray content on some systems with a 120Hz display no longer results in a black screen.

Driver Download
Release Notes (PDF)

Image Credit: AMD

Apple doesn't exactly have the greatest track record on mouse designs, and while you probably weren't going to switch platforms just for a "magic mouse" anyway, thanks to a clever new hack, you won't have to. The team over at uneasysilence.com has found a way to extract both the 32 bit, and 64 bit drivers by using WinRar on the latest Apple Bluetooth update and so far users are reporting no issues. The Apple driver, oddly enough, seems to contain all the components you will need to use the mouse on any Microsoft based machine from Windows XP all the way to Windows 7.

At $70 the magic mouse isn't as hideously overpriced as most Apple hardware, and debatably, it might actually be a decent travel mouse given the profile. Based on how easily the drivers were discovered, it also makes you wonder if Apple had planned Windows support for this mouse all along.

Has anyone tried out the magic mouse or the driver hack? Let us know what you think.

ATI on Tuesday released its Catalyst software suite, version 9.11, for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. The latest release appears to put a heavy focus on squashing bugs as opposed to injecting performance enhancements to specific gaming titles.

New features include GPU acceleration of H.264 video content using Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta, and high quality downscaling for video transcoding MSE. Everything else in the release notes is geared towards resolving issues for various OSes. Some of these include:

• Users can now enable and disable CrossFire when three displays are configured in extended mode (all OSes)
• Catalyst Control Center no longer stops responding when setting Eyefinity SLS mode for extended HDMI display (all OSes)
• Resolved an issue where high bit rate audio from Blu-ray discs might not output when using PowerDVD 10 (Windows 7)
• Wolfenstein no longer stops responding when running a 2560x1600 resolution (Windows 7)
• No more green lines at the bottom of the screen when playing some interlaced content (Vista)
• PowerDVD no longer intermittently terminates when playing HD MPEG2 content in extended/clone mode (Vista)
• Transcoding of AC3 files no longer shows corruption in transcoded files (XP)

There are plenty of other bug fixes, as well as some lingering known issues, all of which you can view in the release notes here (PDF).

Catalyst Download

We're hoping for great things out of Nvidia's upcoming "Fermi" graphics chips, and we can only hope the leaked pics showcasing what the GPU can do turn out to be legit.

The pics come courtesy of Chinese website PCZilla and show a pair of human face renderings like nothing we've ever seen before, at least not on the desktop. There's so much detail the images could pass as real photos, but let's hope they're not.

There's also an image of a ray-traced demo that may not look as impressive at first glance, at least until taking in the various lighting sources and reflections, which requires a second and third look to fully appreciate.Take a peek at all three here.

Update: These scenes are actually taken from a promotional video for Playground Festival -- an AudioArts/Motion Graphics event in the Netherlands. We're not sure if Fermi is actually rendering these scenes in real-time (and even so, it's still texture mapping, and not ray-tracing), or if Nvidia was just using screenshots from the source video to demonstrate the promise of Fermi. (Thanks, Andy!)

Image Credit: pczilla.net

And you thought only your drivers had to be signed.

View original here: 
Ballmer’s Signs Windows 7 Signature Edition

Sometimes free just isn’t free.

See more here:
‘Free’ Windows 7 Upgrades Still Cost Money