I bought an ATi Radeon HD 4850 Graphics card from a well known Manufacturer called AMD or ATi about a year ago. This card performed well, but had several issues with extreme heat dissipation. The card didn’t last very long, when one of the Voltage Regulator Modules blowed & the card was useless. I decided to upgrade & buy an ATi Radeon HD4870 (upgraded from 4850). After I bought the Radeon HD4870 I was experiencing problems with the graphics card, especially with the PowerPlay & Core Stepping features & functions located in the Catalyst Drivers. This will cause the card (driver) to not detect applications demanding graphics commands & the GPU will remain in an idle / low power state, causing extreme slow Graphics Rendering Performance. This is a bug inside the Driver of the card & requires AMD / ATi to fix the problem. This cannot be fixed by the user or low-level Technical Assistance, this will require Software Engineers to look at & fix the problem, which is in the driver (not Catalyst Control Centre). The problem is, their “Technical Support” are supposed to give this information to the engineers & test this on a computer of their own to verify the issue, then they should fix the problem, which wouldn’t take them more than a week. The only problem is: AMD / ATi technical support WILL NOT reply to their users. If you bought a product from them, they’ll give the user NO Technical Support. Half of the problems of their products, they, themselves are not even aware of. Obviously their problems will not be fixed… And obviously they are not using their own products, especially Catalyst Drvier Version 9.6, they would’ve noticed the problem a long time ago.

AMD / ATi are the cheaper solution of it’s competitors Intel & nVIDIA. Intel offers great Technical Assistance & will immediately reply to any problems you may face. They even build the platform you are having problems with & verify the issue & have it fixed right away. Although they cost more, they are WAY better, in Performance, Quality & Technical Support. AMD will save money on their products on things such as cooling & Circuit Self-Protection. nVIDIA cards however offer great Self-Protection, preventing their products from failing in case of Overheating, etc. Intel also offers this protection. AMD / ATi are the cheaper versions of Intel / nVIDIA, but they will Rather choose Quantity over Quality. Performance above Quality. They also have this “We Don’t Care” attitude.

Games having problems with the Radeon HD4870 are:
1.) Need For Speed Most Wanted
2.) Far Cry 2
3.) S.T.A.L.K.E.R – Clear Sky
4.) World of Warcraft
5.) Underground 2
6.) Mostly older games not requiring heavy graphics, but newer games are also affected, such as Crysis & GTA4. The framerate will drop in Catalyst Driver Version 9.6 with up to 80 Frames a Second, wich is TERRIBLE.

Although in games requiring higher graphics demands, such as Call Of Duty, Crysis, Benchmarking applications, etc the card does not have huge problems, but it still in a way. In Call Of Duty, a user with older Catalyst Drivers will have an average 150 FPS better performance than a user using the latest Catalyst 9.6 Driver.

Why this is happening? The Graphics Driver will not ramp up the GPU speed & only give 3 ~ 10% of it’s performance. This is a bug in the Driver, which the manufacturer  AMD / ATi is not aware of. Here are a few forums where other users were also experiencing the same problem (Although they don’t know the technical reasons this is happening):
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=725200
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1358229
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-264412_15_0.html
http://www.yougamers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=96186
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/73339/
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080811225612AA9fHIh

You can just Google on “4870 Poor” or “4870 slow” & you’ll find a ton of results, all of the users are told to update their drivers, but what they don’t know is that the newer Driver is the Cause of their problems.

Unfortunately, at this moment it doesn’t look like AMD / ATi are willing to work on the problem, they don’t give a damn. It’s almost as if they don’t want customers (it obviously explains why ATi / AMD owns only about 15% of the PC market, especially in GPUs). It’s clear that they really don’t want their Engineers to work on the problem & that they ARE NOT willing to give their full support. In fact, they don’t even care about this website, it doesn’t bother them.

My warning to ALL PC consumers is to Stay Away from AMD / ATi, they are cheaper – yes, but their products won’t last long & their drivers are crap, it’s of Low Quality. Rather pay a few bucks extra & buy Intel / nVIDIA. Their products are from outstanding Quality & they do have Technical Support.

The solution: Stay away from Catalyst Driver 9.6 & rather use the older version 9.4
The problem with ATi, their drivers used to give a lot of problems in the past & it looks like nothing have changed. Their drivers still wouldn’t unlock their hardware’s full potential. They maybe tried to “Save Power” in the newer drivers, but instead, they’ll rather break down performance to achieve this.

AMD: Your attitude really stinks. Your products are all of low quality. You don’t care about Customer Support. There are just too many things to say about AMD / ATi. They even once faced the trouble of going bankrupt (I understand why).

I will never, NEVER support AMD / ATi again. NEVER. They can’t even fix a driver problem.