Drivers

Aside from all the fantastic features and 3D performance that the card has, the poor driver support and programming really hinders the AIW’s performance. This problem is not only seen on the AIW, but other Radeon cards as well. The buggy drivers seem to affect the AIW more however because of it’s added features. For instance, the TV-On-Demand option in the bundled TV-Tuner software fails to work properly. In some cases, the digital VCR does not even work at all or only records for 30 seconds. Other people have reported that it’s very CPU dependent and drops a significant amount of frames as it records. Some games are affected as well, but the newer drivers have supposedly corrected and fixed the gaming glitches. Unfortunately, the newer drivers and the new version of Multimedia Center 7.1 (update to the bundled TV-Tuner, DVD player, video capture software) fails to correct any of MMC bugs found in the previous version.

Other problematic issues regard AMD motherboards with a VIA chipset where it has been reported that there are some incompatibility problems for example, system instability or frequent crashes in gaming and in general desktop use. I strongly recommend that you download the newer drivers online because the bundled drivers with the card cause way to many problems in both gaming and multimedia areas. Also, be sure to have the latest VIA drivers which can be downloaded from VIA Hardware. Recently, ATI has officially released the 7075-build drivers, but the leaked 3063 beta build seems to work best with the AIW Radeon and can be downloaded HERE.

If ATI could get their act together and release decent drivers, then there is no doubt that they will totally blow the competition out of the water because they have the potential to do so. However, with poor driver support and an unsatisfactory rate of updates and fixes, ATI still has a long way to go from being the best. Running on the 3063 beta drivers, the AIW performs above satisfactory, but there are still graphic glitches on some games and the TV recording features have unsolved problems.

OVERCLOCKING! -->