ATI is Pissing Me Off

Well, I guess technically AMD is pissing me off what with the merger, buyout, whatever. Catalyst 10.8 came out sometime in the last 2 weeks, between the time I replaced my hard drive when I installed the bugged 10.7 drivers that broke Borderlands, and yesterday when the Borderlands forum indicated 10.8 fixed the issue.

First of all, why wasn’t I alerted to the fact new drivers were released? I registered my card. I installed the ‘communication opt-in’… thingy as part of Catalyst. Based on the description it’s supposed to let you know when important things happen. Personally, I’d say new drivers are important.

Second, I’m sick of bugged drivers. Here’s a brief rundown of the problems I’ve had over the last several driver iteration.

• 10.8 No problems, so far
• 10.7 Broke Borderlands, Fixed Plash player, may have fixed frame rate issue with WoW, though without anyone on recently I haven’t played much lately either to test (not sure when it broke, it’s been happening a long time)
• 10.6 Fixed glitch with Command & Conquer 3, Flash Player still broke
• 10.5 Caused glitch with Command & Conquer 3, broke Flash Player
  

One comment about the WoW issue, what was happening was 10-15 minutes into playing the screen would freeze for 5-10 seconds, and then work fine from that point on. Not a huge issue and I got into the habit of not jumping into anything until the freeze happened because once it did, there weren’t any problems. Annoying though. I don’t recall running into the issue since 10.7, and for all I know it could (though I don’t see how) have been an issue with the old hard drive.

So, I’ve been getting progressing more annoyed with each release that seems to cause a problem and considering getting a new card. Here’s the catch. Everything I’m reading indicates Radeon 5800 line is the way to go. Well ATI’s the one pissing me off.

The GeForce GTX 460 released last month appears to be the way to go on Nvidia’s side of things. And would even going to Nvidia fix anything? Card reviews discuss benchmarks, power usage and temp readings. They don’t let me know Nvidia drivers break CivIV or cause Varian Wrynn’s hair to turn pink.