ATI Catalyst Drivers

[Martin Riddle]

Is this group still active??

anyway, Has anyone noticed the last 2 versions since 14-4 of the ATI
cataylst drivers are a little buggy? I've been getting infrequent
blue screens since the update.
But it might be the GWX updated, don't know.

Thanks

cheers

[VanguardLH]

I'm using ATI Catalyst 14.12 package version (14.501 driver version) on
Windows 7 Home x64 SP-1 with an AMD/ATI HD 7870 video card. No
flakiness with the driver. Flakiness with games (which has been the
case for many years) and apps that have GPU hardware acceleration.

I have some games that will crash. The event log makes it look like an
ATI file was involved but if you trace the stack you find the offender
was the game. It made an improper call to the driver or the game has
bad code. I'm not sure you can find programs as large as games that
have as much crappy code. They cannot afford to include code for
graceful recovery or limits checking. They often bypass status checking
after issuing a call to the driver so the game goes blithely on having
expected the call to succeed when they don't check the status of the
call to notice it failed. They don't build all the libs they use in
their game; e.g., they don't build the physics engine but contract it
from someone else to include in their game. If there's a bug in the 3rd
party lib then it exhibits itself in the game but you think it's a video
driver problem. With games, you have to expect they will crash so
ignore video driver faults when playing games. The last time I remember
not having crashes with games was back when I played Zork which was a
text-mode game.

Could be the driver. Could be the GPU's instruction set. Could the the
GPU-accelerated application is badly coded. Whichever is the case, the
GPU+driver+app combo can be flaky. Except for games, to me it seems the
hardware acceleration feature in apps is at fault for those crashes. In
every web browser, I've had to disable its hardware acceleration
feature; else, the web browser crashes more often.

[Martin Riddle]

Well, it just crashed again with the 14-4 drivers, so it's no the ATI
drivers. A windows error 194, cannot run %1, or something.

fun fun

Cheers

[VanguardLH]

Martin Riddle wrote:

> Well, it just crashed again with the 14-4 drivers, so it's no the ATI
> drivers.

What is "it"? Windows? Web browser? Some other application?

> A windows error 194, cannot run %1, or something.

That looks more like a handler is getting called (filetype association,
MIME type) or a startup program or shortcut which either is not syntaxed
correctly (like omitting double quotes around a path that contains
spaces) or expects a non-blank argument get passed to to it.

There is probably more to the error than you mention. Right-click on
the event and select Copy -> Copy details as text, then paste here.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc734283(v=ws.10).aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc726079(v=ws.10).aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/ee/transform.aspx?ProdName=Windows+Operating+System&ProdVer=5.0&EvtID=194&EvtSrc=Kernel&LCID=1033

http://www.eventid.net/ doesn't list a 194 event ID (with a blank
source).

Bitwidth of drivers /*MUST*/ match the bitdwidth of the OS. Did you
install a 32-bit driver into a 64-bit OS?

[Martin Riddle]

Nothing special installed, just 'started happening'.
I think it is a scheduled task, I haven't searched for it yet.
I tried the OSR crash dump anaylsis, and that is all it told me wiht
some other debug data that is missing symbols.

Cheers