How do you become an AMD Catalyst Beta Tester?

[energyman]

and people who are happy with fglrx don't complain here

[Kano]

Well i support my own distro for years now, the complains about nvidia are minimal. Users need sometimes xorg.conf finetuning when the monitor does not report EDID correctly but thats all in most cases. But the problems you get with fglrx are absolutely annoying.

[cutterjohn]

I fail to understand what's stopping anyone from ignoring complains about a driver that says "beta - it might destroy your data and lock up".

WTH?! The release drivers already do that!

I asked several times about dropping the monthly releases, but was told that it wouldn't really help anything.

Dunno how nvidia can support so many OSes as well as they do... while AMD just kind of waves at ever OS but Windows, and then plays the "but we released the specs" card...

[energyman]

because for years people complained and told AMD/ATI 'release the specs and we will care about the rest'. They released the specs and people like you still complain.

...

[cutterjohn]

because for years people complained and told AMD/ATI 'release the specs and we will care about the rest'. They released the specs and people like you still complain.

...

That's because I could care less if they release the specs or not. I'm just inerested in actually functional drivers, like nVidia manages to supply on a regular basis for nearly a decade now.

[energyman]

tell that to the poor sods on nvnews who are lucky enough to have non working setups.

'nearly a decade'.. yeah, I remember people being forced to flash their cards, because the card bios was incompatible with the nvidia drivers...

[cutterjohn]

tell that to the poor sods on nvnews who are lucky enough to have non working setups.

'nearly a decade'.. yeah, I remember people being forced to flash their cards, because the card bios was incompatible with the nvidia drivers...

Interesting, but it seems like they likely bought cards from a crappy OEM, as I've owned about 10 different nVidia based GPUs over the last 8 or 9 years and never had a problem. Although my last three were all from eVGA. (I've ALWAYS used the generic nVidia release drivers with those boards. Also have a 9800M GS nb which is just happy as pie to use the generic drivers... unlike my AMD GPU based nb... well even "using" those catalyst is more like a beta under linux anyways as there alreayd is data loss until you are aware of when the fault is likely to occur... even then if you're not CONSTANTLY attentive...)

The only problem that I've had with nVidia hardware was the onboard 1Gbps ethernet on the nForce4 chipsets which always seemed to eventually crap out, but I just ignored it and used a PCI 100Mbps ethernet card, as that's all my home network supports anyways.

[energyman]

if asus&co are crappy oems - sure

[cutterjohn]

Sometimes they are actually, but I've used worse than ASUS cards, i.e. budget type, and didn't have problems. It's likely that ASUS probably thought they knew more than they did and tinkered with the BIOS as well as playing with clocks while the cards that I've had probably pretty much used bog standard reference BIOS...

[Laughing1]

I think that form is actually for the Windows beta program, hope to find out next week. The procedure is similar though...

Any news yet?