As AMD video card users awoke this morning and ran their freshly downloaded copies of Futuremark Vantage, they probably got a little pissed off that their graphics scores were significantly lower than anything from NVIDIA. They also probably got a little angry that the first GPU test, featuring Steve Nash’s wife on a jet-ski, rendered with huge amounts of texture corruption.

Well, maybe enough people complained quickly enough to get AMD to issue a hotfix for this issue. AMD knowledge base article 737-33840 outlines the changes made to the Catalyst driver that applies to pretty much every graphics card the company has made in the past two years.

The 3DMark Vantage Catalyst hotfix driver includes bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Please be sure to use this hotfix driver when running 3DMark Vantage
A few notes regarding the ATI Catalyst 3DMark Vantage hotfix driver:

1. Please ensure that you un-install any previous Catalyst driver before installing the Catalyst 3DMark Vantage driver (especially if your current driver is Catalyst 8.4)
2. When enabling/disabling CrossFire, please reboot your system before running 3DMark Vantage
3. Corruption may be seen in GPU Game Test 1 when running 3DMark Vantage on “High Settings” on certain ATI Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire configurations under Windows Vista 32-bit edition
4. Note if any TDR’s are encountered when running 3DMark Vantage, please see the following link: http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017-4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/GPUHang_Det-Rec.doc

Upon downloading (41.1MB for 32-bit, 54.5MB for 64-bit) and installing the file, it would appear that hotfix is really just an updated driver version of the Catalyst 8.4 driver. A system in our labs that scored about P7700 3DMarks before the hotfix now comes in at about P7700 with no image corruption problems afterwards. Big performance improvement eh? NVIDIA cards are still doing a lot better than AMD cards when it comes to 3DMark Vantage. Not that that is important.

Even still, this release shows a huge commitment to customer and product support from AMD; just one more thing that the company has going for it.
DOWNLOAD 32-bit

DOWNLOAD 64-bit

Popularity: 14% [?]

You Should Also Check Out These Post:

• HD 4870 X2 to launch in Mid-August
• Revived GPU war hurting bottom line
• New CEO for AMD. New era for company?
• HD4870 and 4870X2 flex their muscles
• Cooler Master Cosmos S Review

More Active Posts:

• Some Updates (8)
• NVIDIA has an overcomplicated lineup (8)
• Welcome To FPSLabs V3 With Added Awesome! (7)
• NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX on April 1st (7)
• Razer Piranha Review (7)
• Microsoft to sell XP until 2010 (6)
• Weekly Hardware Recap (6)
• The Weekly Hardware Recap (5)
• Newbie's Guide to Vista: The Look (5)
• Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme is on the way (5)