Up until now, this had to be done manually. Gamers had to check the website of their video card manufacturer to see if a new driver has been released since the last driver installation.

A new driver then had to be downloaded and installed manually.

Today AMD announced that they have started adding ATI Radeon video card driver updates to the popular Steam gaming platform.

This new form of distribution makes sense, considering that gamers are the prime group of users who benefit from regular driver updates.

How does it work? Steam users can check for ATI Radeon driver updates by clicking on Steam >Update AMD Video Drivers.

steam amd driver update

Steam will then check if an updated video card driver is available, and prompt the user to download the video driver update.

steam video driver updates

The Install Now button triggers the installation of the drivers on the system. This installation is automatic with no option to customize it. The version that gets downloaded seems to be a universal installer, with a size of over 100 Megabytes. The largest driver at the official AMD Driver site has a size of less than 60 Megabytes.

Users with a slow Internet connection may want to consider that it will take them almost double the time to download the drivers from Steam.

The driver distribution on Steam cannot be automated at this point. Users still need to regularly check for updated drivers in the menu mentioned above, to find out if they are running the latest drivers.

It would be nice if the updates could be automated, for instance by moving the drivers to the Steam library to use Steam’s standard way of updating, which can be set to be completely automatic.

Still, the availability on Steam is a big step for AMD, as it brings the latest drivers directly to a large group of gamers. It does not get a lot more comfortable than this.

Atiedxx.exe and atiesrxx.exe are the AMD External Events Client Module and AMD External Events Service Module. Both processes are executed when the Windows Service AMD External Events Utility is started. This service was known as the ATI Hotkey Poller in Windows XP and Windows Vista.

This means that the service is responsible for providing hotkey access to various ATI features. It is therefor recommended to disable the service if hotkeys are not used to manage ATI features.

Enter [services.msc] in the Windows start menu form or press [Windows R] to enter [services.msc] to open the services configuration menu. Locate the AMD External Events Utility in the list of services. A double-click will open the properties of the service. Make sure to change the startup type from Automatic to Disabled and to Stop the service in the same menu.

This will immediately stop the two processes atiedxx.exe and atiesrxx.exe from running on the computer system and since the startup type was changed to disabled it will prevent the service from being started on Windows startup.

Disabling the service might produce rare problems on some systems that features like the overdrive functionality are no longer working. The service should be enabled again if problems occur.

CLIStart.exe is by default executed on startup of the computer system. It will start the processes ccc.exe and mom.exe which are used to provide access to Ati’s Catalyst Control Center.

Ccc.exe is described as the Catalyst Control Centre: Host application and mom.exe as the Catalyst Control Center: Monitoring Program.

Disabling or removing CliStart.exe from the Windows startup list will stop ccc.exe and mom.exe from being loaded during system start. This is usually not a problem as the video drivers are loaded independently from those processes.

Opening the Catalyst Control Center will start those two processes immediately which makes it somewhat unnecessary to start ccc.exe and mom.exe on startup.

It is therefor recommended to disable clistart.exe from running on Windows startup. This can be achieved by typing in [msconfig.exe] in the Vista or Windows 7 start menu run box or by pressing [Windows R] and typing [msconfig.exe] in there.

The startup tab in the System Configuration window contains the startup entries. Some of them might be disabled already. All items with a checkmark are enabled and will be executed on system start. Removing the checkmark from Catalyst Control Center ensures that mom.exe and ccc.exe are not executed on system startup.

There should not be any problems related to disabling clistart.exe from running on system startup. Re-enabling the startup item is the fix if problems are encountered.

AMD Ati drivers run four different processes on a Windows system by default which are all not needed to operate the system. Our recommendation is therefor to disable them all to save up some computer memory.

Put in the CD that was supplied by Sapphire and started the installation only to be greeted with a “Zero Display Service Error” during video driver installation. All additional tools and programs installed fine though. Back to the low resolution desktop I began a search on the Internet for a solution. I tried firing up a web browser but discovered that my Internet connection was not working. Rebooted the computer once, checked the System Control Panel to find an yellow exclamation mark next to the video card entry.

The properties of the video card were displaying another error message: “Code 12: This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use”. I experienced those situations a lot back in the days of Windows 95 when two hardware devices were sharing the same resources.

I combined that the possibility was high that my network card and video card were sharing the same resources. Radical solution was to remove the network card from the system to see if that was the cause. What can I say, Windows XP booted fine and offered me the usual choice of resolutions. Last step was to put the network card into a different PCI slot.

I read about two dozen forum threats and posts about both error messages and none posted this solution. Hope this helps a few users who are experiencing the same problems (I know many are from the Google searches that I conducted).

24 drives equals a total storage of 6 Terabytes. The other system specs are as impressive. They added a combination of two Intel 3.2GHz QX9775 Quad-Core cpus, two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards, 4GB of 800MHz FB-DIMM DDR2 SDRAM, two Corsair HX1000W power supply units, an Adaptec 5 Series RAID card, an Areca 1680ix-24 RAID card and of course the 24 256GB MLC Solid State Drives.

How fast was the system after all? They managed to top 2 Gigabytes of sequential write and reading speed. They performed some tests like loading all Microsoft Office applications (in 0.5 seconds), all 53 apps of the Windows start menu (in 18.09 seconds), copying a 700 Megabyte DVD rip (0.8 seconds) or recycling 700 files with a total size of 5.6 Gigabytes (instantly).

The viral marketing campaign is highly successful with more than 250K views on Youtube already. Can you imaging running a system like this? What are your thoughts, let us know!