Best drivers for Radeon 9800 Pro (no overclocking)?

[Paul Adams]

Okay, had a bad week at work and so decided to make myself feel better by buying a new graphics card and a SilentX PSU so my little SN41G2 could handle it - only I'm not sure as to what are the "best" drivers to use?

I view overclocking as a complete waste of time, just presenting stability problems more than any obvious performance increase in games (and 3DMark is just a peeing contest ) - so what I'm after is the most reliable drivers for this card.

I've been in the nVidia camp for some time and had to go through the balancing act of getting the best drivers to make legacy games perform properly as well as getting satisfactory performance from new ones, and to be honest I don't have the patience to go through umpteen installs of drivers with reboots and tests in between.

As soon as the card was installed, the first thing I did was head over to www.guru3d.com and grabbed what appear to be the latest "DNA drivers" based on Catalyst 4.3 (I think) - 2.2.4.3a.

While in 3D the card seems to perform excellently, it doesn't seem as "slick" in Windows desktop as my GeForce4 Ti4200 for some reason - subtle delays in redrawing (overlapped/moved) window contents.

System specs:
Shuttle SN41G2 (BIOS & drivers all most recent)
AthlonXP 3000+
1Gb PC2700
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128Mb 8xAGP
120Gb 8Mb cache Seagate Barracuda
Sony DW-U10A DVD+/-RW
(onboard 100Mbps LAN/5.1 sound)
Windows XP Pro SP1

Thanks for any input

[Willy]

http://www.omegacorner.com/ - offers excellent drivers that are based on ATI's original catalyst's but are tweaked slightly for better image quality without sacrificing performance. They are recognised by ATI, with the creator being part of the catalyst beta driver testing team. I'd say they offer all that your looking for and wouldnt hesitate to recommend them.

[JimLad]

I never saw any difference between the Omega's and Catalysts...I'm using the Cat 4.3's at the moment.