Omega drivers for Radeon cards

[13Promet]

I heard many different opinions about Omega drivers: some say they rock, some say they suck.
Any objective data to figure out if it is worth for using them ?

Thank you in advance


Promet

[snapperhead]

http://www.google.com

[Soulyss]

Drivers are a tough call, and most seem to come down to whichever one are preceived to be better by the user.  Best advice I'd say is download them and give it a try.  Only takes a few mins and a reboot or two to uninstall/install drivers.  If you're using ATI go here  and get the cleanup utility.  Run that before installing the Omega's and you should be good to go.  

Personally I kinda like 'em.

[SunKing]

Instead of googling.. just go to the source


Driver Heaven

Where Omega posts and answers questions


Rage3d

Forums devoted to the ATI cards, you'll see fanboys and pised customers , you'll get a good feel for which drivers work best.


Personal the Omega 4.6 drivers work great for D3D.
The new OPENLGL optimized driver he includes works terrbile for me, stick with the standard OPENGL driver install.

[13Promet]

@Soulyss and Sunking:
My question was strictly related to AH2: Aquamark or whatever benchmark is different from our favourite game, therefore different drivers are probably going to affect performance differently.
As for the reply, I expected them to be related to actual FPS differences.
The reason why I did not try them myself is that I was told them not be efficiently uninstallable, therefore I wanted to hear some opinions about them before prceeding, possibly from people having tried them in AH2 environment.

@snapperhead:
thank you for your very useful advice: I would be lost without you.


Regards


Promet

[SunKing]

Well the word on Omega drivers is they are optimized for gaming, ie: better texture quality stable frame rates with AA and AF utilized. I dont touch those nvidia benchmark programs after all the bias I hear they have to their sponsors. What you need to do is just go ahead and install the omegas and test them for yourself. Its simple 10 mins process to correctly uninstall/intall new drivers.

Omegas uninstall just fine.
Here is a walk through on how to properly uninstall reinstall drivers. Walkthrough

In the end personally I don't see any difference in using the Omega drivers.

How I really see a difference is using Rage3d Tweak

And following this tweak guide. Guide After changing these settings stated in the tweak guide, with AA and AF the blurry text cleared up for me.

Another thing to do that acutally bumped up my game performance and FPS is defragging. If you are running XP you should be defragging at least once a week if you are a gamer, NTFS needs it.

I don't have anything else to say, I'd suggest you take these questions to the driver heaven forums, those guys know ati drivers and performances inside and out.

[13Promet]

Thank you very much SunKing: very exhaustive

[Connection]

I use them and love them. Have never even cared to try plain catalysts.

[AKCasca]

Hi 13Promet,

 I have gone from using the ATI release drivers to the Omega drivers and back on most of the last 6-7 releases. At one time I attempted to do some testing with some of the games I most play (AH,IL-2 FB, COD,AA) and found about 2¢ difference in them when I took changing detail levels and screen resolutions into account.  

The Omegas were convienent in that they had overclocking tools as part of the install but again, the trade off in speed never seemed worth the chance of frying a $300+ card.

Also my version of ATI Card is the 9800Pro AIW, and I have no troubles with the Multimedia end of their software using the official release drivers.  

My opinion fwiw is that if you are just looking to noodle about, try them. If you want stable across the board utility and performance, stick with the Official releases.


Jim