I have some unpartitioned hard disk space, I'll try and vanilla XP Pro install and see if that helps using the official ATI drivers. But as I said, I'd not only removed the stuff the ATI drivers put into the add/remove programs list, I'd also blasted the remaining traces out using Driver Cleaner Pro (which is bang up to date).
I'm "lucky"? :) OK yes lucky enough to be able to buy myself a nice card I guess but... :D
Sorry I perhaps didn't phrase my original question right - is there an advantage to using the CCC? I know that it's not possible to control Catalyst AI using the traditional Control Panel applet, is that in itself likely to make a big difference?
Yes, the rest of the system works fine, my OEM (i.e. unbranded, sent in a plain brown box) 9800 Pro worked beautifully with the drivers from
www.ati.com and all diagnostic tests run on my system check out just fine. It's only this particular card that I have problems with and it's ONLY when using the drivers from
www.ati.com, it works fine using older ones from Sapphire (the 5.1's that came with the card, the 5.3's on their site at the time of writing this have issues - see below).
:shocked2: you've obviously never had occasion to use their tech support site then :D OK, I'll try and raise it as a support issue with them although I don't hold out much hope.
Just done my usual uninstall, driver cleaner pro sweep and install of the Cat 5.3's from Sapphire's site. Seems to work better than the
www.ati.com Cat5.5's but sometimes still refusing to use AA/AF/VSync even tho they're forced on with the control panel. Will fiddle some more and see what happens.
Basically tho Andrzej (and just want to say again, thanks for the help/suggestions/feedback/moral support!) using a clean XP Pro SP2 setup with other drivers up to date, I should be able to download the full install (i.e. all in one) package of the latest Cats from
www.ati.com and they will work as intended on my card (sorry if that sounds like a silly question)? If so then either my card or my system has some sort of issue (unlikely that I'm aware of) OR I suspect there's a couple of slight issues with this GPU/Card and certain games that will hopefully be resolved in future Catalyst releases. I can accept if there's issues with the GPU and/or Rialto given it's quite a new part...
Cheers
8bit