Bug report

ALL-IN-WONDER fix

After installing CATALYST 3.9, ALL-IN-WONDER users were unable to play or even launch OpenGL applications, instead they would get the error message “OpenGL could not initialize”. This affected all OpenGL applications, including games such as Quake 3 and any game based on that engine. Fortunately, ATI has responded quickly to this problem, releasing a hotfix earlier this week. All ALL-IN-WONDER users will definitely want to download and install this.

Game issues

The other big issue everyone has been discussing involving CATALYST 3.9 has been Infinity Ward/Activision’s brand new WW2 shooter, Call of Duty. This is an incredibly enjoyable game that already has a large following, and, in this Editor’s opinion, easily outshines EA’s Medal of Honor series. Unfortunately, ATI users have been having nothing but problems with this game. Up until now we haven’t been reporting on it, as Call of Duty was merely a demo based on an unreleased game -- it simply wasn’t fair to criticize ATI’s driver team for a game that wasn’t available, but now that the game is out on store shelves it has become a problem that must be reported on.

Unfortunately, stability with CATALYST 3.9 and Call of Duty is iffy, just like CATALYST 3.8. Some users don’t encounter problems until the car chase level, but we found that problems can crop up as early as early as Dawnville. With CATALYST 3.8, we were able to resolve these issues by disabling fast writes and keeping AA to 2X, any setting higher and stability could become compromised.

Fortunately we could run 4X AA just fine with CATALYST 3.9, but fast writes still had to be disabled for optimal reliability. This can be accomplished in your motherboard’s BIOS, or via the SMARTGART tab in the CATALYST control panel. Disabling fast writes doesn’t bring a noticeable performance hit, so it’s certainly a better solution than rebooting your computer every ten minutes. This is still a setback that needs to get fixed however.

The issues we’ve reported on with IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles have not gone away; texture thrashing is rampant while playing. This can get pretty distracting after awhile. In addition, menu corruption in Battlefied 1942 is still a problem with CATALYST 3.9.

Both of these problems were introduced by CATALYST 3.8, so we hope that the CATALYST team can resolve them quickly in an upcoming driver release.