Why do people never believe me?

[AMD_Man]

Everyone automatically believed that ATI was going to use new drivers for the R300 (Radeon 9700). However, I said that the drivers will remain unified and that the R300 shares many files with the rest of the Radeon series. I've seen it first hand people, I've been hacking ATI drivers for a while, and I'll include the ability to hack ATI drivers (eg. create your own custom drivers like the Omega) through a step by step wizard in ATIMax! Anyway, for those of you who still don't believe me, this is what Rage3D said:

The guys over at ATI have been working their gluteus maximus off not only working on the R300 presentations but also news drivers for all of us and also gearing up for the contest.

Firstly in Anandtech's 9700 preview they stated this:

When ATI showed us the Radeon 8500, they promised that they would finally be moving to a Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) like NVIDIA. But after conversing with one of ATI’s software engineers, we have learned that the R300’s DirectX drivers are completely new.
For starters, they are not based off of the Radeon 8500’s DX drivers, which means that the move to a UDA back with the Radeon 8500 was never really made since the next-generation architecture cannot use the codebase from the previous generation UDA. The benefit of this is that a number of the DirectX problems ATI had in the past should now be fixed. That benefit is also a significant downside because anything that was fixed in the old drivers may now be broken in the new R300 drivers. ATI has told us that the R300’s DirectX drivers will be the basis for the next-generation UDA for future chips; all we can say to this is that for ATI’s sake, they had better be.


I asked the Catalyst Product Manager about it and he wanted to clear up the confusing about it. Here's his response:

There should be no doubt that ATI's CATALYST drivers are unified. Downloading the CATALYST driver from ATI's website will work on any RADEON class product. In particular ATI supports a unified driver architecture (UDA) through its innovative Direct Path (Patent Pending) technology. This is a feature in the 2D driver component that allows the proper Direct3D dll to be loaded dynamically.
Next, for those that think ATI is going to lower support of the 8500/7500 line of cards well they aren't! ATI is in the process of getting final Microsoft WHQL certification and will be posting CATALYST version 02.2 by the end of next week. (cross your fingers)

and lastly CATALYST CREW contest winners have been drawn, and ATI will be notifying the winners in the next couple of days. (lucky dogs! if someone wins from the site and wants to meet up with me just give me a shout)

Believe me next time!