ATI Issues and Settings Recommendations

I am not great with computers and this thread is filled with frightening words that make my eyes twitch, so I am going to ask some possibly stupid questions.

I am receiving a couple of ATI cards today, a 5770 and a 5850 for my family's two PCs. I have run Nvidia cards since basically forever; the last ATI card I had was a Radeon 9800 Pro. Of course now I learn that our main game, CoX, doesn't play nicely with ATI cards at the moment. I have been told in no uncertain terms by She Who Must Be Obeyed that if she can't play her DP fender on Test once this upgrade happens, I may suffer a fate worse than death (my own cooking). Here's my questions:

1. Is this the right way to go about this upgrade: Uninstall Nvidia drivers, reboot into safe mode, run Driver Sweeper to kill off the residual grunge of the old drivers, reboot normally, install the newest ATI drivers?

2. Do I need to install these hotfixes mentioned in the thread?

3. Can I run bloom et cetera in the in-game settings and enable AA in the ATI drivers and have both work? As in, does the ATI driver setting override the ingame setting? Does this also apply for AF?

4. Do I still need to keep water effects Off if I want to use bloom and depth of field, or should I call the whole thing off and just turn off bloom/DoF altogether?

Thanks for your patience, this whole thing is a weird mess and I don't really understand why there is such an issue. Nvidia's stuff just seemed to always work but I am not a brand loyalist and I buy whatever makes the most sense when it's time for an upgrade, so this time it's ATI. I don't understand enough to know whether ATI or Paragon Studios is at fault, but I am pretty sure that neither company wants people to struggle with their products. I'm glad to see that once i17 hits and we get Ultra Mode this will all become moot!

Thank you kindly, I followed your advice and it is working well. The only issue I am having is that I can't alt+tab but I haven't seen a fix for that yet. I hear windowed mode still works but I can't handle the window borders and whatnot so I will just be glad I have a second monitor to use for browsing while I am playing.

Got the new rig with win7 up and running. I can't alt-tab at all either. On the plus side, ATI's FSAA is still cleaner than Nvidia's.

Yeah that's the weird thing about Windows 7. You have to make sure an Aero theme is ON when playing CoH or you can't alt-tab.

Frame rates don't seem to change much between Aero on and off though, so it's not too bad.

I get that flickering whenever I open a window that includes a shot of a game character, like a contact window or my costume window. And the "shot" used is pretty blocky, whereas on my previous, Nvidia-powered system it was fairly smooth.

But I haven't had a crash since using 10.1. I heard 10.2 is out now, any problems?

None so far.

10.2 seem tons better. I might even stick with ATI for the new card. We'll see got $300 to blow on a vid card and maybe some RAM.

Running with a 2 year old mother board. and 2 gig's of ram.

Probably can get away with just the video card.

Yup on the Aero background and alt-tabbing. Works just fine now.

-And the master shall become the student. WOOT!

I run vista, the biggest problem I have is alt tabbing while in game I get some weird glitches when I do that sometimes.

That would be me. We discussed it briefly on the Test server the other day. The second I upgraded to the 10.2 Drivers, it fixed the Alt-tabbing issue. However, please note that if you alt tab excessively, there's a chance that the game will start reading the wrong files or the images. I spent half an hour last night walking through PI wile the sky cycled from clouds and whatnot to a giant version of the zone map to the marble floor from the Atlas City Hall, etc, etc.

Also, I'm not 100% sure, but I followed all the recommended settings in this thread and everything looks...jagged on the edges.

Interestingly enough, my jaggies occur only on Test, but not on live, with the exact same settings.

I've lost my Catalyst Control Center and every time I try to DL it it fails to install.

Help!!!

Just got the XFX 5850 Black Edition and was skimming through this thread and I just want to say Thanks to you Bubba for all of the information in here!

I am unable to alt+tab out of the game since I installed Windows 7. I know about turning on Aero and it is on, I am running the Aero Windows 7 theme, but as soon as I start up CoH Aero turns off. While I am in game I can't alt+tab, and the windows key doesn't work. Well, that's not true. Alt+tab does switch me out of CoH, and the windows key does pull up the start menu, but CoH stays "in front" of everything so I can't see the other applications or the start menu.

I run the game via Steam, if that matters. System is Windows 7 64 bit, Radeon 5850 video card, 10.1 driver version (have also tested with 10.2 with no change.).

I want to reiterate that I do have Aero turned on so as to avoid wasting your time or mine. I think the problem is somehow related to Aero turning off when I run CoH. Is that the normal behaviour?

edit: maybe this isn't so much an ATI issue as a Windows 7 issue? If so I apologize, but the folks in here seem the smartest about video problems

Emberly, I'm on Win7 64bit, with an ATI 5870 and running the latest 10.2 drivers. I have zero issues alt-tabbing, windows keying, anything.

I don't run CHV through steam. EDIT: Completing thoughts is a good thing. have you already hit the steam forums for alt-tabbing questions? I ask because on both nvidia and ati cards, I've run into weirdness of different types alt-tabbing while playing on steam.