Best Gaming Driver for HD4850, late 2009 27"

[tyriad]

Hi, i've got a 27" (i5 2,66ghz - 4gb ram - HD4850) and I'm planning to install bootcamp and Seven.

I heard that Apple GPU drivers are not that good and updated so I would to ask what is the best driver for the HD4850. I know that it is a mobile GPU so can I just download any Ati driver for notebooks GPU and it's going to work under Seven?

Thank you in advance

Tyriad

 

[Huntn]

I don't know the relative merits of Apple's drivers as compared to ATI Catalyst drivers but you'd just go to their site and download the appropriate Catalyst driver for 7 and try it out. There is no reason why it should not work.

However, imo, you should install bootcamp and your favorite game, configure it and run it with the Apple provided bootcamp driver along with Fraps, a frames-per-sec display program running in the background for a base comparison and then try out the ATI driver.

 

[tyriad]

thank you for your answer!

so i later on i can just download the normal ATI catalyst driver for notebook GPUs?

 

[Huntn]

I'm not up on the ATI notebook drivers. You obviously picked up somewhere that the mobile drivers were better? (Wondering why would they be better than what ATI designed for your video card?)

Without having tried it lately, I want to say (anyone correct me if I'm wrong) that the Catalyst program looks at your hardware and applies the appropriate driver to it. My guess is that there would be a way to apply a laptop driver to your hardware by using whatever Window 7's equivalent of the Device Manager is, but someone else will have to jump in here who specifically knows what they are talking about.

 

[TMRaven]

The 4850 is a mobility card, so you'd want to download the mobility drivers anyways.

 

[Huntn]

The 4850 is a mobility card, so you'd want to download the mobility drivers anyways.

I was thinking we were talking about an iMac and did not realize they use a mobility card. My suggestion is just go to the ATI link I provided and download their driver for your video card. In the Windows Device Manager you can upgrade the driver for your card and point it at the file you downloaded. You should still check out performance using the Apple driver first.

 

[aki]

I have a 4850 in my i7. Some time ago I installed the 10.6 radeon mobility drivers (catalyst) and they have worked well for the past few months.

People had reported strange problems including visual banding and 256 colors only with previous versions of Catalyst, but when the then new 10.6 came out I took a chance that they had fixed the problems and they seem to have.

I know the current version is like 10.8 or something like that now, I forget exactly. Following the reasoning of if it aint broke, I haven't updated from the current 10.6. I have no reason to believe that more recent versions would be worse, however.

If you do install a newer version of the Catalyst mobility drivers, can you report back on the results?

Good luck!

(PS Dont forget to update DirectX as well of course!)

 

[aki]

... Sooooo... Catalyst 10.8, how's it looking?

 

[savvos]

Catalyst 10.9 drivers are out and ATI is even distributing them through Steam this time around. They claim it fixes a bunch of bugs.

 

[aki]

Wow they are coming thick and fast huh.

But has anyone here actually installed 10.9 (or anything earlier come to that) on a iMac with the 4850? I have 10.6 installed currently and that definitely works fine; I understand that earlier versions of Catalyst had problems on iMacs with the 4850.

So what about this one? Anyone rolled the dice?

Edit: Hm, just saw this -

Please note that due unforseen circumstances ATI Catalyst Mobility is not supported in ATI Catalyst 10.9. We hope to have support for ATI Catalyst Mobilty available for next months ATI Catalyst release.

http://www.techulous.com/news/ati-catalyst-10-9-is-now-available.html

So I guess we are still on 10.8. Any 10.8 reports then?

 

[Shivetya]

Well reading this thread was good for me, I didn't realize it was safe to upgrade the video drivers in our Windows partitions, is this true whether they are boot camped or through Parallels?

 

[aki]

It's certainly possible, and will definitely improve performance. The only issue is that usually drivers aren't written anticipating Mac hardware, so occasionally there are weird issues eg. with Catalyst prior to 10.6 (people had problems like 256 colors max, and color banding).

This is why I'm keen to hear from anyone with 10.8 or 10.9 when the Mobility version comes. Otherwise I guess I'll just take the jump myself and see.

I -believe- that there is no need to/point in installing video drivers for a Parallels installation of Windows, as Parallels does all that in it's own way anyway. Could be wrong. I run Parallels and I've never installed video drivers on it.