ATI Catalyst 10.6 Released

Yes, but have they fixed the substantial average framerate drop that I was getting in Aion with 10.5s? Using 9.11s right now out of fear of using anything else...

I always checkout the AMD/ATI forum to see what issues there are before I update my driver, and these aren't looking good. I never once had driver related issue with my SLI'd 8800GTXs, and installing drivers was a breeze. Crossfire, and poor driver releases have caused so many issues are real pain. What I would like is ATI power consumption and temps, with Nvidia performance and drivers, and SLI scaleability in multi gpu configuration. One day maybe?

Be wary, installed these plus the crossfire profiles on my i7 with dual 5870s. Frame rate on Bad Company 2 (@1920 x 1080) dropped from 90ish to mid 40s! Maybe its only using single card. Then started crashing to desktop from the game. Tried uninstalling, using driver sweeper and putting 10.5 back on and had all sorts of grief. Going to try rolling back to earlier windows restore point... Plus did ATI say they were going to optimize BF BC2 for their cards and we would get a 40% increase? - 2 releases later I am still waiting :-(

Be wary, installed these plus the crossfire profiles on my i7 with dual 5870s. Frame rate on Bad Company 2 (@1920 x 1080) dropped from 90ish to mid 40s! Maybe its only using single card. Then started crashing to desktop from the game. Tried uninstalling, using driver sweeper and putting 10.5 back on and had all sorts of grief. Going to try rolling back to earlier windows restore point... Plus did ATI say they were going to optimize BF BC2 for their cards and we would get a 40% increase? - 2 releases later I am still waiting :-( Love ATI cards but drivers are often an issue.

They know how to make money for performance card but they don't have a clue about software

Ill hold off to see if there is any issues. Always worth waiting just to be on the safe side. Never test the depth of water with both feet! lol

So many negative comments, I feel the need to say something.

I first switched to ATI (9800xtx) after having years of trouble with nVidia cards, the final conclusion I came to about nVidia was that if you found a driver that worked then never ever update as at least one game broke. A conclusion a number of my friends have been arriving at too. Ah far-Cry with missing textures, haven't seen anything like that since Dark Side on the Spectrum.

On the other hand the only issue I have had with ATI was where my second screen was disabled after every reboot, re-nable it and no more problems (until next reboot). Didn't even bother rolling back. Installed the next release and the issue was gone. I regularly update the 5 machines I have (5870, 4890, 4870, 5600, 4600) and only one issue so far on one card (touch wood), my experience implies that ATI do not release bad drivers.

If ATI drivers were more like nVidia's then I think i'd start buying machines with Intel GMA.

I have had Nvidia cards for at least 5 years with virtually no software/driver issues. a few months ago I bought my first ATi card to upgrade my 8800GTX - a 5870 which is an absolutely great card but their software sucks!! It's difficult to update components individually without installing everything (CCC, display driver, HDMI audio driver etc.) and once they are installed it's hard to identify where the individual components are on my HDD. Every time I upgrade I have had issues with my HDTV HDMI audio not being recognised and I then have to arse about in windows sound settings for half an hour before it magically appears in the list! - Not to mention I'm still getting random crashes on BFBC2.

Been using 10.4 on a 5850. Marks - 20 on 10. No issues whatsoever.

One of the things I was going to say but didn't want the post to turn into an essay is that different people have different experiences, for instance I have never had anything but trouble from Maxtor Hard Disks to the extent where I would rather just shift+del the files and get it over with, yet I suspect many people have good experiences with them.

During the last few years with PC's I have learned some basic maintenance, install only what you need and if you have a major hardware change then do a rebuild (it takes less than 15minutes to re-install Windows 7), maybe if I had known that back then I would have had no nVidia related problems but for now I'll stick with what I know works.

If I have a problem I rebuild, it's far better than google or technet. 1 hour to set your machine right or 1 hour to research a problem with possibly no fix?