14 DAY TRIAL // A number of end-users in possession of ATI Radeon graphics cards from the Radeon HD 5700 and HD 5800 series have been suffering from severe frustration as a consequence of exposure to such occurrences as graphics glitches, vertical line corruptions and gray screens of death. Eager to alleviate the problem as quickly as possible, ATI, business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, has been working on a hotfix for the apparently software-related issue and has now released it for public download.
The issue appeared on systems running said cards and different versions of the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. The computer would randomly stop responding or see the appearance of uninvited vertical lines and. Of course, the gray screen of death was a frequent occurrence as well. Consumer diagnostics to the problem included bad drivers, sensor problems, memory problems and voltage problems. Some end-users even managed to come up with ways of circumventing the issue, or at least reduce the frequency of such corruptions. These “fixes” were adjustments to the idle clocks, when experiencing 2D crashes, and voltage tweaks for the more complicated 3D problems.
After a time of testing, ATI claims to have come up with a hotfix, for the ATI Catalyst driver, that will finally make the cards run perfectly. The fix applies to all the affected cards from the Radeon HD 5800 and HD 5700 series and is compatible with multiple varieties of the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Specifically, the fix works on Windows XP, Windows XP Media Center, Windows XP x64, Window Vista, Windows Vista 32bit, Windows Vista 64bit, Windows 7 32bit and Windows 7 64bit.
Consumers that have been experiencing the aforementioned graphics glitches and system crashes will be able to download the hotfix directly from this page of the company's official website.