I've ordered the 4870 and the 24" LED cinema display for an early 08 pro. I was curious how the ATI drivers are in windows under bootcamp (xp, vista, 7, 64 and or 32bit). Are the ATI drivers (latest from ATI, not the ATI drivers that apple gives via bootcamp) functioning well with the display port or has anyone noticed any issues? I've read from owc that the 4870 display port doesn't work in OS X with 08 mac pro but DVI currently works. The 10.5.7 update is supposed to fix the display port issue in OS X. I've read nothing on the windows driver side with display port. Just curious, thanks all.
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24" LED displayport and 4870 with windows via bootcamp
- Thread starter Xer0dIn
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Do the latest ATi Windows drivers offer any improvement over the Apple/Boot Camp provided ATi drivers?
Almost always, apple only releases bootcamp updates occasionally (All the bootcamp update really is is a batch process that installs drivers that you could have downloaded from the manufacturer (intel motherboard drivers, graphics drivers, etc. and then some apple written drivers for the
keybords and mice) The drivers that apple gives are the same ones that ATI has, just not the current ones. ATI as well as NVIDIA frequently release drivers for windows. Graphics drivers are important to keep updated because they are constantly being improved. Lots of improvements including games in windows especially. That's why I was curious if anyone was having any issues with the latest catalyst drivers from ATI with the 4870. Due to the new technology of the mini display port, I didn't know if there may be weird artifacts, or like 10.5.6 on an 08 mac pro, no video coming out at all yet from the display port.@ Xer0dIn: My question still stands, what improvements have the latest drivers over what Apple provides, or are you assuming there may be improvements between the respective releases? In most cases, driver updates are to provide support for newer hardware, occasionally updates can improve older hardware. Only in the latter case would an update be viable.
@ The Rominator: I'm running Windows 7 without issues.
@ The Rominator: I'm running Windows 7 without issues.
I will use my 8800 GT drivers as an example. But this will apply to ATI as well. The current version of bootcamp from apple is version 2.1. It was released April 24, 2008. The nvidia drivers in that bootcamp update are older than the current drivers from the manufacturers web-site. Nvidia's current driver for my operating system are currently 182.50 released April 02, 2009. I'm running Vista Ultimate 64 bit. On this web-site you will see that the driver updates are not for newer hardware, they fix and increase performance of older hardware.
Here is the link
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_182.50_whql.html
Click product supported to see a list of hardware that this latest driver affects.
As you can see, downloading the latest driver from the manufacturer is a really good idea, and checking continuously is as well. When apple releases a bootcamp update they will have the latest ATI and nvidia drivers for a short period of time, but not for long.
