ATI, Apple and graphics card drivers: still a mess

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
September 18th, 2003 • 10:09 pm

Damien Barrett has an item about trying to find drivers for an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card.

The Radeon card driver issue for Mac has been going on for far too long. Here’s something that I wrote 6 months ago. No improvement since then.

The bottom-line is that, if you bought your card through retail, then ATI are supposed to provide the drivers. If you bought your card as a built-to-order option, that the drivers are supposed to be provided by Apple (as part of the system).

The problem is that ATI is notoriously unreliable about providing proper drivers for cards bought through retail. When you ask them about it, they put the blame on Apple, even though there is no way that Apple can be expected to provide drivers for retail cards that Apple has nothing to do with (however similar they are to the built-to-order ones that Apple uses).

The other problem is that Apple doesn’t provide stand-alone driver installers for the built-to-order cards that it sells. The drivers are part of Mac OS X.

I’ve been through a lot of frustration because of this, and I don’t see any improvements coming. My secondary monitor still suffers from ugly visual artifacts around the mouse pointer in certain applications only. I’ve reported the issue to ATI, they have recognized it as an issue, but they claim that they have fixed it. Of course, they haven’t fixed it. Otherwise I wouldn’t be experiencing it.

It’s just painful. I have a state-of-the-art computer with two high-quality flat-panel displays, and I have to put up with that daily crap.

Good luck, Damien.


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