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Topic: Latest Drivers - Advice Needed (Read 184 times)
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PanchoDaz
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Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« on: March 31, 2004, 02:23:29 PM »
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I have a quick question for those of you who know more about this than I do!
Basically everyone knows that it is recommended that you have the latest drivers for hardware - particularly graphics cards.
What I was wondering is does this make a BIG difference in all cases? For example if it is a new graphics card and fairly recently released then wont the drivers that come with it be fairly recent anyway? Or does it not work like that?
Basically I have a new computer that I built in the last 3 or 4 months and I haven't bothered updating any drives - now as everything is working fine I am not sure whether I should bother. But if it were likely to make a BIG difference then I mite well do.
Any advice would be good - cheers!
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[Guardian] Alkali
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #1 on: March 31, 2004, 02:26:01 PM »
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Normal driver optimisations give up to 3-5% gain max. Occationally a driver is released that uses new features that were always in hardware, but were not implemented until a new software release. In this case, obviously, you gain a lot more than just nominal increases.
On the whole, if you dont really know what your doing, updating your drivers lets say once every 6 months will keep you in a decent performance bracket.
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My Games Collection
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #2 on: March 31, 2004, 02:28:33 PM »
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If your card is more than a year old, use whatever driver release works well for you. Ryo and I will both attest to the numerous problems we had with ATi's drivers and our older Radeons ATi moved to the Catalyst series.
If your card is newer than a year, keep your drivers updated if you're buying and playing new games. New driver releases usually include small performance increases. If you're not playing anything other than CS, it's not worth it.
The thing to remember? "If it's not broken, don't fix it!"
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Fotty
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #3 on: March 31, 2004, 02:35:43 PM »
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If you are using windows XP then you can probably use the driver roll back feature if a new driver you install messes something up... general rule of thumb is you want to keep your stuff up to date... not only are there performance increases sometimes... but bug fixes as well.
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PanchoDaz
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #4 on: March 31, 2004, 02:41:27 PM »
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cheers guys thats pretty much as I'd been thinking. I am one of those people who usually applies "if it aint broke dont fix it" to most things, which is the main reason i havent bothered to update.
I do really only play CS (online anyway) so I havent ever felt like I need that little bit extra.
Its good to know that I'm not losing out on a LOT tho!! 
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #5 on: March 31, 2004, 02:46:49 PM »
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general rule of thumb is you want to keep your stuff up to date... not only are there performance increases sometimes... but bug fixes as well.
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if you're not having any problems with anything you play though, don't mess with it. It's possible the NEW drives could break something that worked fine with the old ones. That happened a LOT with ATI's older drivers and CS before 1.6. There were certain driver versions that would just kill CS outright, and the only thing to do was reinstall everything (sometimes even the OS) from scratch with a difference driver version to get it to come back.
Unless you're having a specific problem, don't mess them.
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Fotty
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #6 on: March 31, 2004, 02:49:28 PM »
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an ATI release broke my CS once as well... but then they patched it to fix it.
I guess it all comes down to what card you have and what driver release you are currently runnning
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #7 on: March 31, 2004, 03:00:40 PM »
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What are Catalysts up to now, 4 something? I'm still running 2.1 because that's what works for me.
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Fotty
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #8 on: March 31, 2004, 03:07:46 PM »
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you might.. i said might want to update your drivers porter.. what card do you have???
I had the same problem you did with a driver release, but the next one fixed it
they are on 4.3 now, they also provide driver packages for every release dating back to 2001
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Narf
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #9 on: April 01, 2004, 10:36:36 AM »
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If it aint broke then be a man and update it to see if it breaks!! When in doubt format....err, update....err do nothing.
I just like to update crap alot. I guess its part of my computer junky nature
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biggums
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #10 on: April 01, 2004, 03:51:06 PM »
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I update whenever i rember to or my computer tells me to. Updating drivers shoudlnt' caus problems as long as they are cetified by that companie.
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #11 on: April 01, 2004, 09:37:54 PM »
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I update whenever i rember to or my computer tells me to. Updating drivers shoudlnt' caus problems as long as they are cetified by that companie.
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yeah, and I bet you trust Microsoft software too. 
Sure the company releasing the drivers may certify them to work, but did Valve certify them to work with CS? Did Blizzard certify them to work with Diablo? Did SOE certify them to work with EverQuest? Do all of these companies certify each and every ATI and nVidia driver release?
See my point yet?
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Fotty
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #12 on: April 02, 2004, 08:25:03 AM »
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yeah, and I bet you trust Microsoft software too.
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I make a pretty good living for myself using Microsoft software
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #13 on: April 02, 2004, 08:32:09 AM »
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| I make a pretty good living for myself using Microsoft software |
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Using and trusting are two different things. I "use" MS software too, but you don't see me trusting that my email program isn't going to install a virus for me or my browser isn't going to accept a maliciously written script and compromise my system. With MS stuff, you can't say, "just try it, it'll work," because the vast majority of time, it just doesn't. Either that or "trying it" breaks something horrendously.
Like I said before, you also can't always trust that the next time you install a driver update, everything that worked before will work again. I just don't have the time anymore to be fixing all those things anymore. I've got WORK to get done. I need a platform that's fast, flexible, efficient and uber-reliable. Windows is NOT it. It's not ANY of those things.
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Narf
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #14 on: April 02, 2004, 10:20:34 AM »
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Just for the record I trust MS software. Linux/Non MS users love to argue this fact, but I'm still sure that if you had nearly as many people hacking away at your software flaws would be found.
That and I have never suffered the ill effects of a virus, email or otherwise. Most people who had gotten an email virus in 2002/2003 were personally at fault for not patching an OLD OLD exploit & not having up to date anti-virus software. Ignorance is not an acceptable answer for me, everything thing has flaws and everyone needs to take personal responsibility to safeguard themselves.
Look at it in a global view and in all industries...car recalls, faulty electronics, cheap toys that break when they shouldnt....just look at the big picture, nothing is perfect.
On a side not, I've decided to become a linux master in my free time(seeing how linux is taking over the world ). Anyone have any suggestions on their favorite distro? Any other good resources that cant be found/linked through slashdot?
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Deuce
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #15 on: April 02, 2004, 10:27:54 AM »
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fast, flexible, efficient and uber-reliable. Windows is NOT it. It's not ANY of those things.
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and yet oddly enough, Windows wipes it butt with macs in the global market.
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Fotty
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #16 on: April 02, 2004, 10:44:18 AM »
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sal you have been saying you are going to learn linux for how long now????
anyway I agree with you if linux was the dominant OS, it would probably get torn to bits by hackers by the users of a not so well known up and coming OS company called Microsoft
Why are there so many Microsoft Viruses???? because if they spent their time writing linux viruses who would they send them to?? their friends that also use linux?
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #17 on: April 02, 2004, 10:46:50 AM »
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| Just for the record I trust MS software. Linux/Non MS users love to argue this fact, but I'm still sure that if you had nearly as many people hacking away at your software flaws would be found. |
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Very true, but when I find a flaw in linux, I have the source code. I can fix it that very minute, and send in a patch. With MS you have to: 1) wait for MS to fix it themselves, and 2) trust that they actually took care of it without creating a new flaw in the process. That doesn't sound like fun to me.
Also, wouldn't you think that without having the source code to windows, it would be HARDER to find exploits? You'd have to just guess at where a flaw might be. Linux is open source: people can find EXACTLY what each line of code does, and use that to break into a system. Wouldn't you think linux would be more vulnerable because of that? So how come linux has such a good track record when it comes to security? Take apache for example: it's the webserver that powers over half the websites in the world-- way more than MS's IIS, and yet you don't hear about apache getting cracked wide open nearly as often as you do IIS.
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| « Last Edit: April 02, 2004, 10:48:05 AM by Porter » |
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[Wumpa] Porter
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slightcrazed
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #18 on: April 02, 2004, 10:51:12 AM »
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On a side not, I've decided to become a linux master in my free time(seeing how linux is taking over the world ). Anyone have any suggestions on their favorite distro? Any other good resources that cant be found/linked through slashdot?
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IF you're serious, then I would start out by downloading a distro like Knoppix. It is a CD based distro that lets you try linux without mucking around with your hard drive. The whole thing runs off of the CD, and it includes just about 2 GB worth of software with it. Great way to start out. From there, I would suggest trying a hard drive based distro, like slackware or Fedora or Debian.....Linux.org has some good tutorials to get you familiar with the user interface (graphical and command line) and Linuxquestions has over 100,000 members and has answers to almost every linux question that has ever come up.
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #19 on: April 02, 2004, 02:11:40 PM »
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Right on cue:
http://www.osvdb.org/
Shouldn't this make linux LESS secure now they're putting ALL the vulnerabilities in one place?
(For the benefit of Slight and other OSS supporters: it's a rhetorical question, because it WILL have precisely that effect.)
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Nittany
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #20 on: April 02, 2004, 02:26:33 PM »
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Does microsoft have pier review?
Didn't think so.
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slightcrazed
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #21 on: April 02, 2004, 02:38:36 PM »
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Right on cue:
http://www.osvdb.org/
Shouldn't this make linux LESS secure now they're putting ALL the vulnerabilities in one place?
(For the benefit of Slight and other OSS supporters: it's a rhetorical question, because it WILL have precisely that effect.)
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It will? Hmmm..... putting all of the vunerabilities in one database may make it easier for crackers to find, but at the same time it makes it easier for a good IT director (or even the average joe like me) to see what vulnerabilities have been found, and to fix them quickly.
BTW, this DB is not linux specific, it covers all open source apps, including many that run on Mac and Winders.
I do partially agree with you porter, but I think there are benefits in this kind of project that can not be ignored.
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #22 on: April 02, 2004, 03:24:15 PM »
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Whoops, meant to say "it will have precisely the opposite effect."
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[Wumpa] Porter
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biggums
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #23 on: April 03, 2004, 06:46:22 PM »
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yeah it seems that everyone is using linux. My german exchange student used linux at his house, everyone seems to think it's better. When/if nittany decides to use linux i'll check it out and make my decision then.
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #24 on: April 05, 2004, 09:52:06 AM »
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and yet oddly enough, Windows wipes it butt with macs in the global market.
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Deuce, you need to read Slashdot. More and more governments are choosing to develop open source platforms for their use instead of paying Microsoft. Why, just the other day there was an article about China, Korea and Japan agreeing to develop their own version of linux to use.
I'm not concerned with your comment in particular, because it's like saying Honda wiped its butt with Mercedes in terms of number of cars sold this year. Well of course they did-- you're talking about cheap (not necessarily bad) cars that anyone can afford. Mercedes on the other hand probably only sold a tenth the number of cars Honda did last year, but you don't see anybody saying a Honda Civic is a "better" car compared to a Mercedes S Class do you? (Notice the quotes: "better" is always subjective, so don't bicker with me on semantics. Most people would choose a Mercedes over a Civic given the choice, that's what I was implying here.)
Hmmm, a 10 percent market share, and a maker of phenomenal products that people LOVE to own/use... who does that remind you of?
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[Wumpa] Porter
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Father Ribs
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Re:Latest Drivers - Advice Needed
« Reply #25 on: April 05, 2004, 10:26:54 AM »
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Getting back on topic for the moment, take the Mac is god, Windows is satan topic to another thread please...
Pancho, updating your drivers is as some people said, a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." However, if you buy lots of new games that come out, it's in your better intrest to continually update your drivers.
ATI once was really bad about their drivers, but that last two years I've thought they've had a good showing of continual improvement, and personally upgrade my drivers whenever I think to check, normally when a new game I've bought isn't running optimally.
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