AMD Catalyst Drivers 8.12 and DeskScapes

Published on December 17, 2008 By Island Dog In Personal Computing

Last week, AMD released an update to their Catalyst drivers, including enhancements that were added specifically for the benefit of DeskScapes users who are still running Windows XP. You should expect to see a dramatic drop in CPU usage especially for dynamic dreams.

We are encouraging all AMD card owners who are using DeskScapes to update their drivers. If you are still using Windows XP, this is a requirement.

The drivers are available for download from http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx or can be accessed directly via the Community tab from Impulse.

Comments

Chahk

on Dec 17, 2008

Will give it a test drive tonight. DS was dogging on my XP partition, taking 100% of one of the cores. Hopefully these drivers will be an improvement.

Chahk

on Dec 19, 2008

Progress. DS is now taking only 49% of one of the cores. Still unacceptable performance though. Everything else from OD+ to just dragging windows around is very sluggish. ATI's got some more work to do.

Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz,
ATI Radeon X1950XT 512MB,
WinXP SP3, DX9.0c, latest ATI drivers.

Neil Banfield

on Dec 19, 2008

Ensure you have forced antialiasing disabled in the ATI drivers.

Also are you using video dreams? If so try a dynamic dream (search for ovals). Does that use a similar level of cpu?

Chahk

on Dec 19, 2008

All tests were done with dynamic dreams only. Not sure about AA, will check it when I get home.

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