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[TheBMan]

After installing the Catalyst 11.10 preview (and previous 11.9 preview) drivers for Rage and Battlefield I'm getting consistent crashes when calling ChoosePixelFormat(...) with a valid PIXELFORMATDESCRIPTOR while creating an OpenGL context.  This works just fine with the release version of Catalyst 11.9.

I tried many different modes, bit depths, accumulation buffer settings and none of them work when calling ChoosePixelFormat(...) with the preview drivers.  Even the OpenGL extension viewer (http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview/) crashes with the same behavior where the driver stops working, the screen goes blank, then restarts.

If you need any other sample code I could post it here.

EDIT: This has been happening on Radeon HD6850 cards (both Sapphire and Powercolor)

[TheBMan]

Just tried this same test again with the new 11.10 preview 3 drivers and the same thing happens.  The display driver stops working, the screen goes blank and the app either hangs or crashes.  Tried this with many different simple OpenGL test apps, OpenGL Extension Viewer, my own code and they all exhibit a similar crash.

It appears that a Radeon 5770 card works with the new preview drivers but both the Powercolor and Sapphire Radeon 6850 cards will experience the crash.

The event logs shows amdkmdap crashing with event id 4101.

And this tweet from @CatalystCreator really scares me!

http://twitter.com/#!/CatalystCreator/status/126409396031991809

If this is true, it means this preview driver is going to be released fairly close to how it is now and break a lot of applications.  Is there a better place to post this information to get attention or a response?  Does AMD even read these forums or test any other applications besides games?

[TheBMan]

Looks like the problem with native OpenGL apps got fixed in the released version of Catalyst 11.10 but guess what?  AMD broke Rage by back rev'ing the atioglxx.dll from the preview release.  The new version is (6.14.10.11161) and the old preview 3 version is (6.14.10.11299); which is actually newer.

To solve the problem I just copied atioglxx.dll from preview 3 into my \Windows\SysWow64 folder.  To do this, I ran expand on the atioglxx.dl_ from the package folder in \AMD\AMD_Catalyst_11.10_Preview3_Windows7_Vista.

What gives with quality control at AMD?  It seems to be getting worse.  Too many possibilities to even speculate on.  The last stable release I've been recommending to our customers is Catalyst 11.5.

[TheBMan]

Need to correct the specifics of my testing.

I had Rage broken at home on my Radeon 5770 with Catalyst 11.10 (release) and used the atioglxx.dll from preview 3 package.  That works to roll it forward.

It now appears that AMD must have used an earlier version of atioglxx because they broke OpenGL on Radeon 6850 cards with the preview 3 version.