eastcoast

Hi all.

First off let me say that the Omega drivers have generally been awesome on all my past ATI hardware - 9200M, 9700M, 1900XT.. but now I have a 3870 running 4.8.442 under Windows Server 2003, and while it does operate on the desktop, and under various games (TF2, SupCom, etc) I've noticed what seems to be a very consistent bug, and I don't know whether this is Omega-related or a function of the ATI driver itself, since I cannot compare to any standard Catalyst driver as ATI has seen fit to leave Windows 2003 completely unsupported: literally, every modern Catalyst driver either disallows install entirely, or displays a system message about incompatibility at boot and defaults to standard VGA driver. Windows 2003 is not even listed on the ATI webpages as a choice for driver downloads.

I have found that sometimes when I play a WMV or AVI video file, the 3870 card locks up. I've verified with several different videos using the Gspot video utility that all videos causing this problem are encoded in Microsoft's VC-1 codec. h264, Divx and other codecs play back just fine, every file causing it is stored in VC-1. The screen goes black, and the card goes into some sort of loop as the fan continues to ramp up faster and faster. The system does not crash, but the only way out of this loop is to reset the power.

Has anyone ever seen this problem under Windows 2003 or other versions of Windows even? Is this related to the version of Catalyst drivers? I am at a total loss here because there are so many variables, and ATI is basically no help at all.