The difference a driver can make

Today’s post is not technically mmo related. This post is regarding the problems we gamers often run into with new technology.

I bought a shiny new pc around 6 months ago which included an ATI 5850 graphics card. As you may know if your a regular reader I play two main MMO’s, Battleground Europe for my PvP and Everquest 2 for my PvE experiences.

The 5850 was a nice card and worked great in EQ2, but Battleground Europe was another story. Despite the suggestions on the forums I could not get it to run the game for more than a minute without crashing. For me this wasn’t acceptable and as I knew the MD of the company I bought the PC from (I used to work there), I gave him a shout and he kindly accepted the card back, even though the card wasn’t faulty.

Out came my trusty Nvidia 8800GTX, the card I had run for the past 6 months, plus a couple of years before that. It ran everything I threw at it without issues.

I had been waiting for the new Nvidia Fermi cards to arrive before upgrading once again with a credit note from PC Specialist waiting for me to spend. As the early benchmarks came in showing the Fermi cards to have larger power draw, noise and cost than the ATI 5000 series, I wasn’t really wanting to order one. Before the Nvidia fan’s jump on this post, I know they are both powerful cards but not worth the cost compared to their ATI equivalents. Especially in the UK where we pay more for items like this.

I instead bought a Powercolor PCS+ 5870 from Overclockers. I actually ordered a standard 5870 and received the PCS+ version, I had half expected it due to other reviews on the product page, but it was a bonus to actually get it.

I tried the card with EQ2 and LOTR which both ran fine, Battleground Europe was still it seems suffering from the same problems as before. I could play a while and then crash.

I couldn’t believe that CRS (Cornered Rat Software) hadn’t fixed the issues with ATI cards and the game. It seems there is a history of issues with ATI cards and BE. I actually pre-ordered one of the new Fermi cards (a GTX470), as I wanted to be able to play one of the two main MMO’s I subscribe to.

Still not happy I searched the web for an answer to my problems with Battleground Europe and found some 10.4 beta drivers. I was a bit hesitant as these drivers could be dodgy having not come from the ATI website. As I was at the end of my tether with the card I tried the new drivers anyway and rebooted to try Battleground.

I managed to play for 4 hours with only one crash, a black screen freeze. The occasional crash happens in that game so I wasn’t too bothered with that. Since then I have reinstalled windows 7 (as I had a strange bug with flash I couldn’t fix), along with all the other programs and applications I use. I managed to play BE without problems since then so it seems these beta drivers have solved the problem, resulting in a cancellation of my 470 pre order.

Who is at fault here? I’m not sure to be honest, sure maybe I was daft getting a 2nd ATI 5000 series but in the end it paid off as far as I’m concerned. I am more concerned with the fact it took 6 months of driver releases to make a game work with the 5000 series cards. Is it the developers of BE or the people at ATI that are to blame? Well the developers at CRS only have one game to make work with various cards, ATI have countless games to support. How hard would it be to get the two to work together to come up with a problem? Maybe ATI were not concerned by problems with a smaller MMO, maybe they did try to work it out together, I guess I’ll never know.

The whole thing has just left me annoyed at both companies but in time that annoyance will fade as I enjoy both my shiny new card and continued play time in Battleground Europe.

I guess the point of my post is, if you had a similar problem where a component stopped you playing a game you enjoyed what would you do? Would you swap the component, be patient, or quit the game until a solution was found?