I regularly check the AMD Catalyst driver download page to see if a new driver version has been released by AMD. When I went there today I saw a second AMD Catalyst Package which I had never seen before. It was listed below the standard Catalyst Software Suite as AMD Catalyst Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) [...]

Categories: Hardware, Tutorials Basic

Especially gamers need to make sure that their video card drivers are up to date. Why? Because those drivers may add new features, improve compatibility of games or the overall performance while gaming or performing other gpu intensive tasks on the PC. Up until now, this had to be done manually. Gamers had to check [...]

Categories: Windows

AMD has decided to kill off the ATI brand, synonymous with high performance graphics cards, to bring them under it’s own brand instead. AMD acquired ATI four years ago and pledged to preserve the brand at the time.  Now though, market research for the company has suggested its own brand is well known enough to [...]

Categories: Hardware

I bought a new and shiny ATI HD 4870 video card today. Had been using an Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS for some time and figured that it was time to update. I began by uninstalling all traces of Nvidia card drivers from the computer system (funny that I’m still stuck with an Nvidia Physx icon [...]

Categories: Hardware, Tutorials Basic

The following article is a guide to create profiles for the installed video card to optimize it for different applications, namely working on the desktop and gaming. The problem with running a video card in Windows is that the video card will always use the same clock and fan speeds no matter if it is [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

RivaTuner is a freeware tweak utility for NVIDIA and ATI based video cards. I have been using RivaTuner for a while to reduce the fan speed of my video card to decrease the noise level. I configured it to decrease the fan speed to 25% in 2D mode which includes all applications such as word processing and internet surfing. This is the lowest setting that is possible and it did reduce the fan speed so that the video card is almost silent.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

Did you ever upgrade the hardware of your computer with, lets say, a new graphic or sound card ? Did you know that the drivers and registry settings of the old cards are still on your system and normally not removed ? This could let to errors especially if you did install additional utilities that try to speed up video playback for instance. I’m going to show a way to remove all those obsolete drivers and registry settings.

Categories: Operating Systems, Windows