Radeon Drivers for 9700 mobile

I always love the rumors on the other side of the GPU street. ;-)

ATi (and as far as I know, nVIDIA) does NOT support mobility chips. The main reason is because each laptop manufacturer is responsible for designing their own cards. Hence, a MR9700 from Dell may not look a thing like the MR9700 from ALienWare. Not only might they not look alike, each company may implement the cards in different ways (different memory, different core/mem speeds, etc) Thus, to avoid the headaches of mobility users e-mailing ATi tech support, ATi removed support for the mobility chipsets and expects the system manufacturer to provide drivers.

However, this does not mean you are forced to used Dell drivers. It just so happens, though, that Dell recently released new drivers for the MR9700 which are based on Catalyst 4.8. So, I personally recommend using these Dell drivers. There are however three other options:

1. Official Catalyst Drivers
2. Omega Drivers
3. DNA Drivers

Now, I just got finished saying how ATi removed support for mobility chips. It would be more accurate to say: "ATi remove the ability to install the Catalyst drivers on a mobility chip." Using DH Mod Tool the Official Catalyst Drivers can be modified so that they will install onto a mobility chip. The Omega Drivers and DNA Drivers are based upon the Official Catalyst drivers and attempt to further optimize the drivers for better performance and/or stability. Also, both of these install without further modification by the end user.

thx Cad   :-)

 

Great reply and it will save me heaps of mucking around when I recieve my new laptop

 

 

 

Please be forewarned that all advice to use Catalyst, Omega, Forceware, etc. drivers on a portable should be preceded with a great big CAVEAT EMPTOR.

Dell (and I presume other mfr's) test the driver with the hardware to make sure ALL of it functions properly from my experience (next paragraph).  For those using Radeon 9700 on I9100 or XPS, there aren't as many ways to get yourself in trouble since it doesn't attach to a dock or anything.  However, if you are ever in a habit of going into standby or hibernate, or if you hot-plug/un-plug external monitors and use Fn-F8 like I do, you want to make sure you have a driver that behaves properly in PORTABLE BEHAVIOR situations.

I decided to try an Omega driver on my I8600 with Radeon 9600 a while back to get the whizzy-dizzy performance my old slug of a 7.93 driver didn't have in it.  I dock & undock regularly several times a day, standby & resume are normal fare for me, etc.  In short, I am a portable PC user, not a PC user that happens to have a portable.  Within 24 hours, I had locked up twice (forcing me to do a 4-second power button power down) and got a blue screen (yup, it was the graphics driver) for my troubles.  I uninstalled the driver that next day, re-installed the Dell driver and, yeah, I don't get the frame rate on Quake 3 or the benchmark numbers y'all get, but I also don't blue screen when I'm doing simple mobile behavior that I use day-in, day-out.

I am with everyone else that is irritated that Dell doesn't update drivers.  That is a disappointment.  However, when doing mobile things like power management, etc., be forewarned that 3rd parties are not checking their marvelously tweaked drivers for all the stuff they busted to get you those extra 50 points in 3DMark 2003.

Just my $0.02

Vandal

 

Message Edited by vandalii on 09-08-2004 01:55 AM

vandalii does have a point...

However, as far as registry concerns go... I've spent at least 10 hours in the past week or so studying the differences between the Omega Drivers and the Dell Drivers. In my opinion, the problem you experienced is a fluke. I even noticed in the Dell drivers, one of the registry entries which relates to mobile features of the ATi GPUs was DISABLED. Granted, I am not an expert on drivers... YET... but I find it interesting Dell would disable mobile features.

As far as Dell making "ALL" functions are properly functioning... I'm gonna have to shoot that one down big time. It is NOT normal for a screen, when closed, to revert to the smallest possible resolution (640 x 480) which is what happens in MR9600 cards when the lid on a 8600 is closed. The system should retain whatever resolution is being used, and NOT resize all windows and readjust icon posistion. So much for Dell testing to make sure "ALL" functions. This is one which seems RATHER hard to miss. Apparently Dell never closed their screens during testing.... pretty thorough testing, eh?

Okay, the point about Dell making sure the driver behaves properly doesn't mean they are perfect as you point out.  They are, however, better-behaved for me docking and undocking 6-10 times a day.  As for my experience being a "fluke", I also tried a Catalyst driver about a month after the Omega driver experiment (modified the INF to add my I8600 SSID to the right line) and had a couple of hangs that day (no BSOD's, thankfully) so returned to the Dell driver, oldy-moldy as it is and no more hangs.

The registry and INF are only part of the deal.  The binaries are also important and some of them *are* unique from one OEM to another.  I've pulled down HP, Dell and IBM drivers that are supposed to be from the same main driver branch (Radeon Mobility 9600 drivers) but INF's have different settings, some of the binaries are different, the control panel selections are different, etc.  So they have builds that appear to be tuned for specific OEM's, at least on the portable side.

I'm pretty confident Omega drivers are *not* checked for Dell mobile functions, docking and undocking, Power Play, standby/resume, mode persistence, (a feature Dell brought out on the I8500 -- isn't perfect but works fine for me remembering the settings I have for specific display configs).  My experience with Dell drivers on Inspiron 7500, 8200, I8500 & 8600 is they work docking & undocking, etc.  And customer support doesn't blow me off for having 3rd party (read: unsupported by Dell) drivers.

As for INF/registry settings that have names that suggest functionality (like mobile features), you are right, we need an expert to tell us whether the name means what we think it does.  Any out there that could tell us about the key "DALRULE_MOBILEFEATURES"?

Anyway, you stay with Omega, I'll stick with Dell.  No more BSOD's for me...

vandal

Hi
I have the ATI Radeon 9600 running on my Dell D800 (i8600 share the same motherboard) and am currently using the Omega driver. I use the D800 with a 23"inch widescreen LCD through a D/Dock Expansion Station. I have just undocked and redock with no problem with resolution or blue screen. I also use the laptop while commuting on trains, planes and have always used hibernation with no problems. Only time I get a problem is when I don't install OS properly when I reformat hard drive - only do that when software corruption is to difficult to fix. I honestly have not experience anymore instability issues using the Omega drivers instead of Dell drivers. The only thing I can say is that I had to install Dell's driver first before the Omega driver to make sure that there are no black bands when using external widescreen LCD on dual display mode. For some reason if I don't do it, the desktop wouldn't stretch the across the whole external screen when dual display mode is used (there is a gaps on both sides of the screen).

FYI - The reason for the black borders when you ONLY install the Omega Drivers is because it doesn't seem to have any registry entries which enable video expansion in the display settings. The Dell drivers enable it by default and thus the registry entry gets written. If you install the Omega Drivers and then enable video expansion, you shouldn't ever have trouble.

Just FYI.

Thanks for the FYI. I am afraid it might a bit complex though. If I only install the Omega driver I have absolutely no problems if a) I only display on the laptop screen or b) I only display on the external screen. The screen stretches fully under both scenarios. The problem only arise if I use the clone mode to  display on BOTH. When I do so I have absolute no problems on the laptop screen. On the external screen I have approx 1/4" band on both side, please note that the screen is not in 4:3 format, it is still 16:9 but more like 15.8:9 (if you know what I mean). That is it is stretched but not stretched properly. I don't remember what happens with the Catalyst drivers. I haven't had time to work out a registry fix and happy live with the routine I use. Do you know the entries involve? Be curious about it.

I noticed you have installed Win XP SP2. Have you had any problems or performance hit using the SP2? Be interested to know.

I haven't had any problems with SP2 and I haven't noticed any performance hits.