Tonight, after hours of fruitless attempts to get my fucking piece of shit Radeon 9800 Pro card working as it should, I have come to the following conclusion - all ATI products are worthless garbage and should be piled up and burned so they no longer pollute this world with their crappiness. Engineers that designed them should be lined up and shot in the back. With a rocket launcher. Repeatedly.
Fuck, I'll just start from the beginning - my torment started six months ago when memory on my Gainward GeForce Ti4600 gave up the ghost (all nVidia cards are worthless garbage and should be piled up and burned... you get the picture), so I replaced it with Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro. My happiness with the brand new video card didn't last very long, because the damned piece of shit was overheating and causing the system to crash all the time. After breaking a couple of keyboards in frustration, I invested money into a giant VGA cooler and patiently installed it. Voilá, my card was working perfectly. However, it was working perfectly only because all the games I played until today were relatively old (2003 and older). This has been partially due to shortage of good PC titles through most of 2004.
Today, however, I got my hands on Need For Speed Underground 2 and figured I might as well give it a try. I fired up the game, configured everything and anxiously awaited my first race... and when the track loaded, quite a sight awaited me. Or rather, a non-sight. Namely, everything was black - every texture, every object, everything except my car's headlights. I fiddles with gamma correction and brightness a bit, but all I accomplished was that pervasive black color turned into a shade of grey. Brilliant.
Already mildly pissed, I quit the game and decided it was time to update my video card drivers. Until then, I had been using the same version of Catalyst that had come with my card, which I had bought last May. I surfed over to ATI website, immediately noticing their piss-poor web design. I found my way to the latest version Catalysts, downloaded them, began the installation, cringed at the incredibly ugly low-res image at the installation screen and waited. The system restarted, I prompty edited the registry to get rid of the memory-eating ATI shit that loads on start-up, opened Firefox for god-knows-what-reason... and noticed something odd. Namely, window no longer loaded instantly, but row by row, as if it dropped down. I can't describe it, you have to see it for yourselves - picture blinds getting pulled down and you will get an idea of what I'm going through. But that's not all - whenever I try to scroll up or down, the whole goddamn window goes through the same process of reloading and getting "pulled down". It takes me five fucking minutes to scroll to the bottom of a page. At first I thought this occurence was just limited to the browser, but no, this wonderful "effect" exteneds to every window - even fucking WinAmp no longer loads normally! I thought ATI drivers reactivated some stupid WinXP visual effect, however they are all turned off as they should be. Un-fucking-believable!
Okay, I calmed myself (well, not really, but at least I managed to restrain my urge to disintegrate everything in sight) and decided to give NFS another try. The fucking game couldn't even start! I got a stupid error message, followed by my desktop resolution changing to 640x480 and all my beautifully arranged icons scattering. AAAAARGH!!! With trembling hand, I reached for the mouse and rapidly located the nearest game shortcut, fearing the worst - and the worst happened. Crash. Error. Resolution change.... I can no longer start games! Any games! Any 3D games! For fuck's sake! I immediately rushed to ATI site, clicked my way to the drivers page and noticed their "recommendation" to install Service Pack 2 before attempting to install their shitty drivers. Now, I have been postponing transition to SP2, because I fear what it might do to my older games, but now it's the only option I have. Either that, or revert to the ancient version of Catalyst that can't run any newer games. Just fucking great! I went to the Windows Update page, where I was fucking rejected! Rejected?! It appears assholes at Microsoft don't let you use Windows Update if you have a browser other than Internet Explorer! On second thought, I'm not even mildly surprised by their impertinence. Luckily, there is a zipped version available, but it's about thousand times larger than the "normal" version and I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft purposefully infected it with trojans to spite Mozilla users. Fuck them. Fuck the capitalist pricks!
So now I'm waiting for the goddamn SP2 to download and pondering the most painful way to execute an ATI software developer. I mean, what kind of mentally retarded jackass dipshit crew does that idiot company employ?! What kind of a fucking incompetent moron do you have to be to have release shitty, unfinished, buggy, background-task-memory-devouring drivers version after version, year after year, without even the slightest notion of improvement over your proverbial mediocrity?! I guess they are aware of their own ineptitude when it comes to developing drivers, since they have this written on their download page: Installing a new driver is only recommended if you are having issues with your ATI product, including those mentioned in the "Fixed in this driver". Translation from corporate English to marxist corporation-hating cynic English is something like this: In the extremely unlikely and nigh impossible event that your current driver build is working without any major fuck-ups, for fuck's sake, don't install a new version - we are, after all, too much of lazy fucktards to be bothered with releasing a version that isn't utter piece of shit, so if you already made the mistake of purchasing one of our below mediocre cards, don't expect it to actually WORK properly. I mean, can you fucking believe it? A video card company that openly discourages its customers from keeping their products up-to-date, effectively admitting their own incompetence! You know, my nVidia card may have met a gruesome end (though it's really not nVidia's fault, but Gainward's, since it was the memory that malfunctioned), but I long more than ever for the near-perfection of their legendary Detonator drivers. Now those were the drivers that work flawlessly as they should, and morons from ATI can only dream of achieving that level of perfection. Tonight I have firmly decided - I will reward their laziness, negligence, irresponsibility and ineptitude with never buying another ATI card again! Bluntly put - I'd rather get a fucking Parhelia right now than invest another cent into a defective ATI product. As far as I'm concerned, they can stove their shitty cards up their asses. From now on, it's nVidia all the way for me.
Fuck, I'll just start from the beginning - my torment started six months ago when memory on my Gainward GeForce Ti4600 gave up the ghost (all nVidia cards are worthless garbage and should be piled up and burned... you get the picture), so I replaced it with Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro. My happiness with the brand new video card didn't last very long, because the damned piece of shit was overheating and causing the system to crash all the time. After breaking a couple of keyboards in frustration, I invested money into a giant VGA cooler and patiently installed it. Voilá, my card was working perfectly. However, it was working perfectly only because all the games I played until today were relatively old (2003 and older). This has been partially due to shortage of good PC titles through most of 2004.
Today, however, I got my hands on Need For Speed Underground 2 and figured I might as well give it a try. I fired up the game, configured everything and anxiously awaited my first race... and when the track loaded, quite a sight awaited me. Or rather, a non-sight. Namely, everything was black - every texture, every object, everything except my car's headlights. I fiddles with gamma correction and brightness a bit, but all I accomplished was that pervasive black color turned into a shade of grey. Brilliant.
Already mildly pissed, I quit the game and decided it was time to update my video card drivers. Until then, I had been using the same version of Catalyst that had come with my card, which I had bought last May. I surfed over to ATI website, immediately noticing their piss-poor web design. I found my way to the latest version Catalysts, downloaded them, began the installation, cringed at the incredibly ugly low-res image at the installation screen and waited. The system restarted, I prompty edited the registry to get rid of the memory-eating ATI shit that loads on start-up, opened Firefox for god-knows-what-reason... and noticed something odd. Namely, window no longer loaded instantly, but row by row, as if it dropped down. I can't describe it, you have to see it for yourselves - picture blinds getting pulled down and you will get an idea of what I'm going through. But that's not all - whenever I try to scroll up or down, the whole goddamn window goes through the same process of reloading and getting "pulled down". It takes me five fucking minutes to scroll to the bottom of a page. At first I thought this occurence was just limited to the browser, but no, this wonderful "effect" exteneds to every window - even fucking WinAmp no longer loads normally! I thought ATI drivers reactivated some stupid WinXP visual effect, however they are all turned off as they should be. Un-fucking-believable!
Okay, I calmed myself (well, not really, but at least I managed to restrain my urge to disintegrate everything in sight) and decided to give NFS another try. The fucking game couldn't even start! I got a stupid error message, followed by my desktop resolution changing to 640x480 and all my beautifully arranged icons scattering. AAAAARGH!!! With trembling hand, I reached for the mouse and rapidly located the nearest game shortcut, fearing the worst - and the worst happened. Crash. Error. Resolution change.... I can no longer start games! Any games! Any 3D games! For fuck's sake! I immediately rushed to ATI site, clicked my way to the drivers page and noticed their "recommendation" to install Service Pack 2 before attempting to install their shitty drivers. Now, I have been postponing transition to SP2, because I fear what it might do to my older games, but now it's the only option I have. Either that, or revert to the ancient version of Catalyst that can't run any newer games. Just fucking great! I went to the Windows Update page, where I was fucking rejected! Rejected?! It appears assholes at Microsoft don't let you use Windows Update if you have a browser other than Internet Explorer! On second thought, I'm not even mildly surprised by their impertinence. Luckily, there is a zipped version available, but it's about thousand times larger than the "normal" version and I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft purposefully infected it with trojans to spite Mozilla users. Fuck them. Fuck the capitalist pricks!
So now I'm waiting for the goddamn SP2 to download and pondering the most painful way to execute an ATI software developer. I mean, what kind of mentally retarded jackass dipshit crew does that idiot company employ?! What kind of a fucking incompetent moron do you have to be to have release shitty, unfinished, buggy, background-task-memory-devouring drivers version after version, year after year, without even the slightest notion of improvement over your proverbial mediocrity?! I guess they are aware of their own ineptitude when it comes to developing drivers, since they have this written on their download page: Installing a new driver is only recommended if you are having issues with your ATI product, including those mentioned in the "Fixed in this driver". Translation from corporate English to marxist corporation-hating cynic English is something like this: In the extremely unlikely and nigh impossible event that your current driver build is working without any major fuck-ups, for fuck's sake, don't install a new version - we are, after all, too much of lazy fucktards to be bothered with releasing a version that isn't utter piece of shit, so if you already made the mistake of purchasing one of our below mediocre cards, don't expect it to actually WORK properly. I mean, can you fucking believe it? A video card company that openly discourages its customers from keeping their products up-to-date, effectively admitting their own incompetence! You know, my nVidia card may have met a gruesome end (though it's really not nVidia's fault, but Gainward's, since it was the memory that malfunctioned), but I long more than ever for the near-perfection of their legendary Detonator drivers. Now those were the drivers that work flawlessly as they should, and morons from ATI can only dream of achieving that level of perfection. Tonight I have firmly decided - I will reward their laziness, negligence, irresponsibility and ineptitude with never buying another ATI card again! Bluntly put - I'd rather get a fucking Parhelia right now than invest another cent into a defective ATI product. As far as I'm concerned, they can stove their shitty cards up their asses. From now on, it's nVidia all the way for me.
