AMD officially killed the ATI brand.

AMD decided to kill the ATI brand after they made some studies which showed that people don't care too much about it. In case you didn't know, ATI has been bought a few years ago by AMD, because it wanted to enter on the market of graphic cards (and AMD considered that buying ATI and starting a fight directly against NVIDIA was the best option).

Starting from now, every new card which will be released by ATI AMD is no longer going to be called ATI. This is a bad news for some people who really liked the ATI brand, as they might now consider of turning to NVIDIA. Or....not. But, anyways, I don't see this as a quite intelligent move made by AMD. First graphic cards to be named AMD are going to be launched later this year.

OK, this is going to be really weird. How can you say AMD Radeon 5870? 

Ubuntu 10.04 + Nvidia FX proprietary drivers? Maybe not!

I never was a fan of Nvidia's graphic cards. I don't have a reason for this, but I simply prefer ATI's products. And after what Nvidia proprietary driver did when I activated it in Ubuntu 10.04, I surely won't be a fan of them ever. So here are the details. An AMD platform (32-bit), with a Nvidia FX 5600 graphic card and a fresh-installed Ubuntu 10.04.

Nvidia usually makes its own drivers for Linux distributions. These kinds of drivers are known as "proprietary drivers", which means that their code is made and developed by Nvidia developers. In Ubuntu, in case that something goes wrong (including a driver), developers (from anywhere in the world) start working (on open source code) immediately on a fix so that it is available as soon as possible in the Update Manager. But with Nvidia, the situation is different. Because it's a proprietary driver, Ubuntu's developers doesn't have access to the code (because it isn't a public or open source code), so they can't improve or fix it. Any user using a Nvidia graphic card under Ubuntu has to wait for Nvidia's developers in case that it appears a problem with the driver.

So here's my problem. After I activated Nvidia's driver (version 173), it asked for a reboot. Until then, everything worked fine. But after reboot...it happened...I don't know what. I can't even explain. Under the VGA port, the image was highly affected. I could hardly read something on the screen (the colors and the image were totally misplaced). The monitor (Samsung T220) was continuously warning me that the image is displayed in "not optimum mode", and even after I got into driver's settings and changed them from auto to 1680 x 1050 with 60 Hz, the situation remained the same. The image on the monitor was starting to color white at every 10 seconds, and I was afraid that this can burn the pixels or even broke the entire monitor.

On DVI, the situation was completely different. The image looked pretty OK, however, the monitor was still warning me that it is in "not optimum mode" and it was restarting at every 1-3 seconds. This happens both with driver version 173 which is recommended, and with version 96 to which I have access.

In now stuck on a desktop without any accelerated video driver, but at least, this works (even if it is quite slow). The only thing I can do is to hope and wait for Nvidia to update their stupid driver for Ubuntu 10.04. I don't know why, but I think that Nvidia won't change something here...I hope I'm wrong. I know that there are some open-source drivers for Nvidia called "Nouveau" but I observed that they are only for GeForce6 and above (mine is GeForce 5).

So, if you installed one of these drivers with problems, try to enter into "hardware drivers" to remove it, and then reboot. In this way, you will be able to use your computer.

If you know how to fix this, please let me know via a comment.

ATI HD 3xxx + Realtek HD problems on Windows XP.

I have a computer with an ATI HD 3850 graphic card which has, practically, included a sound card. The problem is that on the motherboard I have a Realtek HD sound card, which enters in conflict with the graphic card. From what I have observed, ATI starts the conflict and forces Windows to keep the sound played via their drivers (which is done through a HDMI connected to graphic card). This will make any try to play sound through motherboard's sound card to fail.

The solution is to go on device manager, and there to disable ATI HD sound card (under sound devices). Windows won't have any option, and will automatically playback sound via Realtek HD sound card.

This should apply to any ATI graphic card from series HD 3xxx.

ATI Radeon X300 aero on Windows 7/Vista.

*Update: Download ATI Radeon X300 driver for Windows 7: http://www.4shared.com/file/199253812/27d26aeb/atix300driver.html

I attached a link which contains the back-up of the driver for ATI Radeon X300 for Windows 7. Since I'm no longer using Windows 7, I can't tell you for sure if it works or not (it should be working). I think it might be installed via control panel, by clicking update drivers (and selecting the file you've downloaded). Note that you should have WinRAR, because it's a .rar file (uncompress it before starting the update procedure). Please leave a comment to know if works or not !

*

As you probably know, the are some problems on running aero effects from Windows Vista or 7 on ATI Radeon X300 graphic cards, due to incompatible drivers with these operating systems. After searching for hours on forums, I thought there is no change of running aero from Windows 7 on my Dell D610 laptop. But I found a solution, when I was searching a driver for my sound card.

There is a program available, named DriverMax, which searches automatically for newer drivers available for all your components inside your computer. In the free version, you can download only 2 updates for any pc component every day, in the paid version the number being unlimited. Until now, it did his job excellent on all my computers, even if they were running Windows XP, Vista or 7.


So, just give it a try, it takes you nothing: http://www.innovative-sol.com/drivermax/