What should I do when switching vid card from NVidia to ATI?

[RepoMan]

Got a 6800GT right now, and my X1950 Pro AGP just arrived.

Should I run some kind of driver cleaner or something before switching the cards? Or should I just follow the good old instructions and not worry about all the many NVidia Forcewares I've installed?

[Bill Hiles]

Got a 6800GT right now, and my X1950 Pro AGP just arrived.

Should I run some kind of driver cleaner or something before switching the cards? Or should I just follow the good old instructions and not worry about all the many NVidia Forcewares I've installed?

I also just got the X1950 Pro after using a 6600GT. I have an Nforce board so I just went to control panel - add or remove programs and got rid of the display drivers. Then I rebooted and used Driver Cleaner to get rid of any left over files.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Securit...-Cleaner.shtml

[RepoMan]

I got scared by driver cleaner -- it said "NVidia" and that was it. I have the NVidia RAID drivers and Nforce and all the rest of it (it's an MSI Neo Platinum) and driver cleaner is just a little too terse about what it was going to do. So, I just went ahead and installed the Catalyst drivers, and all seems perfectly happy :-)

If things get weird, I might do the driver cleaner thing, but right now it ain't (apparently) broke and I'd rather not hose any unrelated nvidia drivers. If driver cleaner just said "NVidia display drivers" instead of just "NVidia", I'd feel better....

[unbongwah]

Driver Cleaner is overkill most of the time, IMHO: the default ATI / nVidia uninstaller is usually sufficient. I don't think I've ever needed to use DC.

[Zylon]

Kill the Catalyst Control Center. It's hideous bloatware that in my experience is only good for initial setup, after which its always-on status should be revoked.

Then go replay Thief. That's what pushed me into jumping from NVidia to ATI-- NVidia's drivers have been getting progressively worse at rendering Dark Engine games for a while now. Posterized sky textures, hideous green transparencies, Z-sort errors, and apparently the latest cards won't run Thief at all for some people.

[wisefool]

I also just switched from 6800gt to Visiontek x1950 pro AGP. Tipped off to the purchase in Best Buy by nice people on this forum (they must be viral marketers whose sole purpose is to entice innocent citizens to the Tree of Ubertech.)

3d stuff runs pretty darn well at 1920x1200, with AA on/off depending on the game. However it now seems 2d refresh is slow at times - Firefox scrolling seems to be as slow as when you start with VGA drivers. So is dragging windows around.

I double-checked and my drivers seem correctly installed. Could this be a mythical power supply issue?

Out of any component, power supply is probably just slightly less annoying than a motherboard swap so I'd like to avoid it. I ran some benchmarking and 3d seems to work properly, so it would seem unlikely to be a hardware issue. I'm guessing it's some component of the 2d drivers if that's still separate. Any tools I can use to check GUI drivers, or what should I look for?

NOTE: I threw away the included CD and just downloaded latest ATI drivers from the web. That's not my mistake is it?

EDIT: Out of a hunch I went to ATITool and set Adaptive Antialiasing to "ON". Screen went blank a second and my 2d acceleration was snappy as normal. Strange stuff.