Luckily AMD/ATI do provide current and tested drivers on their site even for these custom laptop versions of their cards so for me now this is not a problem.
Now obviously you should still get drivers from the card manufacturer not the laptop manufacturer - for instance ACER are pretty slack when it comes to testing newer drivers from ATI so I might get an update once a year if lucky, and probably never will again since my laptop is now more than 3 years old.
There is an inherent risk if I were to force the install of the latest standard Radeon HD5xxx driver instead of the recommended Mobility Radeon HD5xxx driver that certain functions would be able to push the GPU beyond its safe operating temperature. In many cases some functions considered non-essential are either simplified, slowed down or removed. Sammi79 wrote:One thing I will add in reply to the thread on modding the driver installs to install newer drivers than are recommended by the driver suppliers (in my case AMD/ATI) - Laptop video cards are invariably compromised relative to their desktop counterparts for obvious reasons - mainly physical space and cooling. So, having gotten my long-winded introduction out the way, and given you the links to the tools, let's get to business. (Though I am concentrating on ATI here, I gather a similar situation applies to laptops with NVIDIA graphics, as there is a tool similar to the one I will describe available for modding NVIDIA drivers.)įor laptops with Intel GPU's, see post #10 by Capt. Despite this, however, I could not get X1300 drivers to install.Įventually, I discovered the Hardware Heaven Mobility Modder, which absolutely gets my vote for Utility of the Year. Some research and reading around the web turned up the fact that this was because it's a special version of the X1300, and is functionally the same as an X1300. In my case, even on official sites I found few or no references to my GPU. Here is how I got the latest AMD drivers to work with my new (ok, it's 1 year old, but it's new for me) ASUS Pro31J laptop which uses the rare and somewhat orphaned X2300 GPU. However, it turns out to be possible to modify current AMD (or nvidia) drivers, so that they will successfully install to a laptop. Unfortunately, attempts to install the AMD drivers in place of the manufacturers ones always fail. The problem is, because the graphics are "good enough" for most applications, updates to their graphics drivers are few and far between, (if they can be bothered at all) and always lag a long way behind those released by AMD. They prefer that their customers only use drivers officially released by themselves. You see, most laptop manufacturers don't allow AMD (who now own what was ATI) to include drivers for their graphics in the Catalyst Mobility drivers installer.
However, if the nosplash option doesn't work, the only solution is to update your graphics drivers, but for laptop owners with ATI graphics chips, this is much easier said than done. Often, the cure for this can be implemented quite easily, either by updating to the latest drivers or implementing the "-nosplash" switch when starting Oolite. Talk about that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. Most people who've been hanging around the Oolite Forums for a while are familiar with the problems caused by old ATI or NVIDIA drivers, usually seen in plaintive messages posted by newcomers to Oolite.įor the un-initiated, here is a screenshot of what they are greeted with when, eagerly and with much anticipation, they fire up Oolite for the first time.
Possibly now also Windows 8, though I haven't tested this.) (As you may have guessed already, this thread is only for Windows laptops, because this only works with XP, Vista and Windows 7.