New Ati hotfix driver - New Catalyst 8.11 Beta

PogMoThoin

Far Cry 2, Stalker Clear Sky, Brother In Arms - Hell's Highway HotFix

# Improves performance for the DirectX 9 version of Far Cry 2 on CrossFire™ compatible systems
# Improves performance for the DirectX 10 version of Far Cry 2 on both single and CrossFire™ compatible systems
# Improves performance for the DirectX 10 and DirectX 10.1 version of Stalker Clear Sky on both single and CrossFireX configurations at higher resolutions
# Brothers in Arms - Hells Highway no longer displays corruption on the 'Black Friday' level.

Not tried it yet, its still dl'in

PogMoThoin

A note concerning Clear Sky is that there is a DX10.1 patch out

BadCharlie

I downloaded the hotfix for the 8.10 drivers. So no need to do that with the 8.11.

PogMoThoin

The 8.10 hotfix wasn't an add on to the 8.10 driver, it was the complete fixed driver. It wasn't meant to be installed over the 8.10. I found that out the hard way when I had stuttering issues when I did it like You (just installing over 8.10), but an uninstall, driver sweep and fresh install of just the hotfixed driver worked and sorted my issues.

This is the same hotfixes and more applied to 8.11Beta which for me has given great gains in Crysis (honestly nearly 5fps in benchmark) and the games mentioned above. Its a keeper for me until it goes WHQL as it seems to be the best driver I've tried. Install it fresh after uninstalling and running driver sweeper in safe mode. Ati seem to be throwing everything in2 their drivers lately, can't fault them

PogMoThoin

Here's the latest:

Catalyst Hotfix 71310 Restores Visual Elements at Expense of Performance
AMD had released an updated hotfix to its ATI Catalyst 8.10 drivers the other day, with hotfix 71310. It succeeded hotfix 70517 for the said version of Catalyst. Hotfixes specific to certain games, are intended to selectively improve hardware performance and/or visual quality. When AMD released the older hotfix for version 8.10 of Catalyst, it aimed to improve performance in general. It was later found by keen observers, that the hotfix manipulated with visual elements of the game in an attempt to gain performance. A popular example of this, was noted in the "lost rocks" issue in Far Cry 2, where the hotfix 70517 caused the texture and/or geometric loss of certain rocks along a track from a scene, presumably reducing load on the graphics processor(s).

With hotfix 71310 issued yesterday, AMD seems to have fixed the issue. Expreview put the hotfix to test, where it was found that the "lost rocks" issue was fixed. The larger issue was of the driver interfering with visual elements the game has to offer. The fix however, came at the expense of performance. Expreview used a test-bed consisting of Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU, ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics, 2x 1 GB of DDR3 1066 MHz memory, all seated on an ASUS Striker II Extreme motherboard, running Windows Vista 32-bit operating system. The testers used Driver Sweeper to make sure a new variant of the driver installed on a purged environment. Testing Far Cry 2 revealed that the issue was addressed, but at a performance loss. The frame-rate dropped from 48.12 fps to 43.20, which is roughly a 10% loss in frame-rate.

Full Article

BadCharlie

Will prob update then tonight, had no time last night was playing basketball.