I jst saw that it was out this morning.
It seems that the issues with Kotor 2 have not been solved: :( http://www2.ati.com/drivers/Catalyst_53_release_notes.html)

Relevant Extract from the release notes:


Known Issues for CATALYST™ Software Suite 5.3

The following section provides a brief description of known issues associated with the latest version of CATALYST™. These include the following:
[...]

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: Playing the game under Windows XP with an ATI RADEON 9800 series installed, results in display corruption being noticed when changing the in-game options from low to maximum Topic number 737-10091
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic: Loading the Dantooine level of the game under Windows XP results in slow game performance Topic # 737-10092
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: Setting the graphic option in the CATALYST™ CONTROL CENTER to Optimal Quality, followed by launching the game and setting the resolution option to 1600x1200, results in a performance drop being noticed. Topic # 737-10093
Assigning a hotkey to increase the overlay gamma results in the hotkey not functioning properly when playing an MPEG using the Windows Media Player. Topic number 737-494
The Apply button in the Custom settings of the Advanced mode found under the CATALYST™ CONTROL CENTER Video standard settings is grayed out when playing a media file. Topic number 737-497
Installing the display driver and the CATALYST™ CONTROL CENTER, results in a runtime error and the system tray failing to start when attempting to create multiple user accounts and enabling fast user switching. Topic number 737-10084
The CATALYST™ CONTROL CENTER installation currently does not check for the installation of Microsoft .Net Framework before preceding with the install, resulting in an error message being displayed when attempting to launch the CATALYST™ CONTROL CENTER. Topic number 737-10085
Setting the desktop display to 800x600 or 1600x1200 16/32bpp results in the incorrect display resolution information being provided when checking the video control panel in the CATALYST™ CONTROL CENTER. Topic number 737-10087
Using the ATI Problem Report Wizard under Windows XP SP2 with an ATI RADEON X850 XT installed results in an error message appearing when clicking the Finish button for the problem report. Topic number 737-10088
Hesitation and display corruption is noticed when moving an MCE window from the primary display device to a secondary TV or DVI display device. Topic number 737-114987

well, give me a minute, and i'll get right on it. thanx for the info darth333. :D

I installed the 5.3 drivers, loaded my Korriban savegame, took 10 steps and it crashed; Reset pc, reloaded savegame, 10 steps and crash....
So back to 4.11...

hmm, interesting. i guess it could be that i'm using the 4.11 cats openGL driver in my kotor2 directory, but as far as i can tell, the game works just as well as it did before. no framerate increase or decrease and no loss of quality. :)

5.3 doesn't help much. Frame rate is still the same. Glow is not back (so much for the improved-openGL talk).

I still have a 9800 Pro, once your card gets over a year or more the only improvements are in specific game performance not overall, if I recall.
Im waiting for the Omega 5.3 version, with officals metioning specificly problems with KotOR I will not even bother at this point.

If you have newer ATI cards say the X800 series or higher it might be worth installing as newer hardware seems to have a chance of improved performance of up to 25%, depending of the driver version and hardware.

Especially since they mention problems with KotOR, I would definalty keep that Cat 4.11 atioglxx.dll backed up, looks like it will be helpful for awhile to come.

Knocking on wood, I have had no stability issues on Dantooine et al. since updating to Catalyst 5.3 and adding "Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1" to the swkotor2.ini file.

Here is the text from my config file. Hope it helps.
(BTW My GPU is a Radeon X800 XT, 256MB RAM, and System RAM is 4GB)

[Graphics Options]
Grass=1
Shadows=1
EnableHardwareMouse=1
FullScreen=1
AllowSoftShadows=1
RefreshRate=75
Width=1280
Height=1024
Emitters=1
Anisotropy=8
Frame Buffer=1
Soft Shadows=1
Brightness=56
V-Sync=1
Texture Quality=2
Anti Aliasing=6
Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1

4 GB of RAM!!!! :eyeraise:

what on earth do you do on that machine where in needs 4GB of RAM????

seriously, i would like to know, please??? ;)

Aside from games, I do a lot of audio editing and scanning of old research documents requiring high resolution. Besides, I figured I would go all out so that my system would be obsolete in 2 years instead of 1.

hmm, interesting. i was just curious because from what i understand, most things tend to slow down on XP after you install more than 2GB of RAM. a few framerate tests confirmed this with a couple of games. however, if you do stuff for documents and the like, then go for it. my specialty is getting games to run in a blend of performance and visual quality.

and to be honest, from what i understand, anyways, you really shouldn't be seeing too many benefits from having so much RAM unless you're running on an Athlon 64 w/ the very soon to be released Win XP 64. theoretically, that version of Windows is supposed to handle up to 10 GB of memory. but, unless you have that combo, you may be doing more to slow your machine down than anything.

of course, if you're an IT guy and know better, you can ignore the ranting 18 yr old otherwise known as me.... :rolleyes:

Out of boredom I tried 5.3s and imeadatly had problems with a newer game Bloodlines.
After less than 30 mins of play I would start to see Serious texture degrading as in menus were unreadable, wall textures lost all effexts and saw (what I believe were) 256 x256 texture blocks that looked like blurry checker board squares.

So needless to say once I removed them everything was back to normal.

Also a bit of good news seems Omega was overwheled with support from fans and will now be continuing his work, YAY :)

Ati 5.4 is out. Anyone try that yet?

:x-wing:

I did and even made a thread about it.

There was no difference for me since I didn't encounter any of the problems fixed in the new driver. If everything was fine in 5.3, it should be the same with 5.4 .
If you had problems, it'll probably fix those.

I'm pretty unsure anyway.

Thanks Luke. I'll look for that thread; I should have done a search to begin with.

:x-wing: