ATI.I can't emphasize the name of that horrible company enough.
I just had SEVERE display corruption just now, in Windows, while using Audition to work on sPoop. It seems to me like whenever DirectDraw is utilized while Audition is running, the ATI drivers flips the fuck out when I switch back to Audition. It slows the system down to a CRAWL and draws junk all over the screen. Naturally, it doesn't happen on any of the systems I've used Audition on that have had nVidia or Intel GPUs, only ATI.
I've heard of someone replacing the X300 in the Inspiron 9300 with a GeForce Go 7800GTX. Maybe I'll look into doing that...this system would SCREAM if I did could manage that. It doesn't seem like it would be tough; I mean, the system is built to accommodate a number of different graphics cards so it probably just has a smaller PCI-E x16 slot inside.
Edit: And, per usual, I have to reboot my fucking computer to fix the problem. argh! Also, to clarify why this is definitely a driver issue, the problem doesn't only occur with Audition. I've seen it occur in Microsoft Office as well.
I swear, I'm never buying another ATI device for a computer ever again. I've given them FAR more chances than I should have:
- Strike one: The Rage 128 drivers for Windows 9x. I had to keep three drivers versions on my system at all times. FF7 needed one driver version because newer drivers broke palletized textures and never fixed them, Quake engine games required another driver because later ones broke whatever they used to render underwater objects (again, this went unfixed for several releases), and Quake 3 required a later driver because the game wouldn't start with the older versions. I brought this issue up to ATI and they actually told me to keep uninstalling/reinstalling drivers to play my games. What the hell kind of solution is that?
- Strike two: Failure to respond to my tech support inquiry. I don't remember which title I was having problems with, but due to driver issues I wasn't able to get one of my games to work AT ALL. They never responded to me.
- Strike three: The failure to deliver the promised Rage Fury MAXX drivers. After being a Windows 2000 user for a while I decided to upgrade my Rage Fury in favor of a twin-GPU Rage Fury MAXX (from what I've seen, I'm one of the few idiots who bought one of those). ATI had vehemently promised Windows 2000 drivers, going so far as to slap stickers on the box claiming that they'd be available. I trapped myself in my Win98 install, awaiting the promised drivers. They never arrived. Rather than fessing up to their mistake (by that, I mean admitting that they didn't do any research on how their implementation of dual GPUs wouldn't work properly on Windows NT 5) and offering the customers that they fucked over a refund, they made a very silent posting on their web site and let the matter drop. Way to go.
- Strike four: The ATI IGP320M is the shittiest northbridge in existence. My old piece of shit laptop (Compaq *shudder* Presario 2140US) had an AMD processor teamed up with an ATI bus. The processor (an Athlon XP Mobile 2200+, basically just the equivalent desktop processor with PowerNow attached to it) was speedy. It ran quite hot, but it got the job done. The ATI bus, on the other hand, pushed data around less efficiently than my old 486. Disk access was startlingly slow, memory access times were mediocre, and the system ran like shit because of it. The GPU was the most god-awful thing I've ever used. It did things like tell DirectX that it supported hardware T&L despite its "support" being horrible broken, causing games to slow to a crawl (in other words, calling itself a Radeon was a complete misnomer, given that the Radeon line is analogous to the GeForce in that regard as being their first GPUs with T&L support). As far as performance goes, I've read several articles that it was half as powerful as a Radeon 7000. The Radeon 7000 is a budget card. See why that's more than a little disappointing? I should consider the bus and GPU separate and give them two strikes, but I'll be nice and only consider it as one.
- Strike five, six, seven, eight, etc: Every single problem I've had with my current laptop. Between the initially poor Linux drivers, the display corruption issues, the occasional GPU resets that happen in mid-game, extreme compatibility issues (UT99-based games are unplayable in DirectX), blue screens (Call of Duty 4 causes my computer to BSOD, as does exiting ZZT -- a game made in 1991 -- without bringing it out of fullscreen mode), etc, well...really, I don't know what more to say. This is a great laptop, well constructed, solid design, great display, but it's marred by me being too cheap to put a GeForce in it. The only problems that I've had with this machine are related to ATI's shitty drivers.
