Bravo to ATI!

Since the launch of Blackbird, we have received numerous awards from many publications on our system. We shipped a mix of review systems, launching with ATI Crossfire, and some with Nvidia SLI graphics.

Some of the ATI reviews went to publications that were very critical of our video card choice. Needless to say these publications were focused on frame rates on very specific scripted benchmarks and narrowed their scope to the graphic subsystem rather than the overall system experience.

Our goal with using ATI on some of these review machines was to show the overall flexibility of the Blackbird platform, and while our competitors choose to limit choices we wanted to keep our customers' options open. So we created machines like the Alpha Configuration and went to market with it.

In the meantime we were seeing a push for 3 and 4 GPUs in the high end PC, and we were still concentrating on making the Vista gaming experience better. Re-read the article on time to market vs stability and you’ll see some of the things I’m speaking about.

Well, I mentioned in that article that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was released, and shortly after ATI released a hot-fix for their Catalyst driver. Since then I’ve been playing a number of games, and I honestly cannot believe what I’m seeing.

Yes, I can't believe my eyes... It's like I'm dreaming, but I'm just not 100% sure a pinch will change anything. For the last few weeks I have not had ONE driver drop in Vista with ATI Crossfire….all of the games I had the error with are running much better.

This should be a lesson to everyone: ATI is doing great things on the graphics side right now. Frame rates are NOT the most important thing --- the most important factor in gaming is stability and visual quality. If you can buy an PC with optimized graphics for the display resolution that you are running (in my case 2560x1600) then you’ll be a much happier person, believe me.

So cheers to ATI, you graphic ninjas, for getting it right. The fact that I didn't have to replace my hardware to overcome the issue speaks volumes. I still need to go back and re-evaluate Nvidia - but we would love to hear from anyone out there with Vista and driver drop issues - please seed this message to all the forums that you think could provide input. We need as much information as possible to proceed.