Initial impressions of ATI's drivers...

[BlackStar]

Maybe I should try 9.11? Would that work decently with a 5750?

Chances are they won't work at all. The 5750 was released this January, IIRC.

[cutterjohn]

Maybe I should try 9.11? Would that work decently with a 5750?

9.11 you could try it...

They seem to typically(IME) release new drivers on Wed/Thu 3rd or 4th week of the month, so I'm hoping that 10.3 will be out next week and fix a bunch of these regressions. (Seems like they were more worried about slapping in some sort of 5XXX support than anything over the last 3 releases.)

Rarely they release drivers earlier in the month, and the only time that I really recall it happening was in December which is easily explained by the end of month holidays.

[cutterjohn]

Well, changing sound from 24b to 16b didn't actually help much for windows as the problem popped up a few times yesterday but not as frequently.

A further note of oddity is that on one of the runs it happened when the GPU went from a cold idle to running the app which triggered the display driver has stopped working immediately after the window completed drawing with GPU temp @ 51C. Also noted while testing Oblivious that this problem almost never happened outdoors unless near a light source primarily of a "flame" type. The problem also appears to happen indoors in lit areas as well, again with a "flame" type light source so I'm suspicious of a Catalyst driver problem relating to whatever is done in that engine for lighting fx, which must be distinct from the effect that they used in the Oblivion zones as I don't recall ever having the problem there and it appears to use a similar lighting effect to that used by "flame" light sources. I'll have to pay more attention to when this occurs in Drakensang and see if I can spot a similarity(unlikely as I don't believe that I can determine which shaders are in use or look at the shader code).

(Tried all sort of various settings, A.I. standard/high/off, underclocking, lower resolutions, lower gfx settings(shaders still enabled to 3.0 I believe if the Gamebryo setting works, unsure about what Drakensang's engine does), etc. to no avail. This may be related to the WoW problem if GPU specific code that is shared between Windows and linux.)

[seebs]

It did seem that the weird corruption was strongly linked to flame effects.

For now, I've gone back to the nVidia card -- running it with wine's directx driver, I played for about 8 hours with exactly one crash, and that crash is one that affects Windows users too -- if you have draw distance too large, there's a couple of places where the game can crash from having too much stuff in memory at once.