ATI 4870 Drivers

Vista indicates that my drivers are version 8.501.0.0 but the ATI site shows the current drivers to be 8.12. How can that be?
I am experiencing a lot of issues with a new pc including a black screen forcing a hard reboot when I attempt to launch Windows Media Center. Thought maybe a driver update on the video card might help.

Isn't the 8.5 a beta driver for W7?

I don't know. The pc came that way.

There are two numbers to look at regarding ATI drivers, the Catalyst version number and the driver version number,



In my case the driver version is 8.561 and the Cat version is 8.12. From what I can see what you have installed is the Cat 8.6. So yes if you want the latest then you will need to install the Cat 8.12.

how is cat version 8.12 a later version than 8.6?

ATI unlike Nvidia release a new driver once a month (with the occasional hotfix thrown in), and the Catalyst numbering makes it very easy to determine which driver version you have. Best way to describe it is that the first number refers to the year and the second the month of release. In the case of what you have (8.6) it was released back in June of this year, and the 8.12 was released in December of this year.

The next driver to be released will be the Catalyst 9.1 sometime in Janruary, with each subsequent month going up by one (9.2 for February, etc).

thank you. Looks like I might have to wait for that next version to solve my issues. I have been unable to launch Windows Media Center with any Catalyst drivers installed. I go straight to a black screen.

Hey FortuneSmiles,

I recently had some similar issues with my new system that was built for me. Would you happen to have any other media programs installed in addition to Media Center? The problem I had was that Nero 7 was installed on my computer (not by me) to burn DVD's and I was told that version 7 had some issues with the 64 bit Vista. An update to Nero seems to have cleared it up for me. I was getting some major disruptions as well previously. Other multimedia software could have a simlar effect on your system.

I started experiencing the problem even after a clean rebuild of Vista. Just the standard stuff was there at the time. No additional installs.