Recently I brought a Dell laptop (…no, don't even go there) and installed the most recent drivers supplied by Dell.
To my utter dismay, when I tried to run the JME2 samples that use GLSL they simply did not work - causing the application to crash!
The same went for the game I'm working on, it crashed. Even the ATI GLSL IDE RenderMonkey crashed whenever it tries to render any GLSL code!
…After some digging around it appears that the Vendor / Manufacturer (Dell in this case) gets to choose which of the ATI features for the they want, and which they do not want.
For those of you who find this hard to believe take note of the text at the bottom of this product page from ATI:
http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/NOTEBOOK/GRAPHICS/ATI-MOBILITY-HD-5700/Pages/hd-5650-specs.aspx
Aye, its scary when OEM's are left to their own devices… There shouldn't be anything inherently unsafe about getting the drivers straight from ATI, which are always more up to date anyway…
If you poke around the steam game forums or other places online, you'll see an excruciating amount of problems fixed by updating the stock drivers.
Nothing to say about Dell laptops though, theirs are some of the least polluted out of the box
sbook wrote:
If you poke around the steam game forums or other places online, you'll see an excruciating amount of problems fixed by updating the stock drivers.
What concerns me about this most is this: installing ATI is fine for techie orientated people, but the majority of users are going to feel less comfortable is replacing the drivers already installed from the vendor with some downloaded from a site brandishing the warning of 'use at your own risk'.
Really what get me is that this is an additional hurdle to prevent a someone trying out an application.
I suspect that the vendor has reasons for doing this ...but arrrgggH!!!!