Sometimes you can use the reference drivers because the company licensing the chip didn't alter it too much, other times you really have to use the specific drivers that came with the card. My desktop is fine with the reference drivers, but my laptop can't turn on and off the wireless if I use the reference drivers rather than Lenovo's drivers.

Most of the time when you need to use the specific drivers it's because they deviated from the default a bit and you wind up with stability problems.

+rep for sharing that info. I will not update until they fix it.

Eh... You don't have to update your drivers all the time - especially since 14.4 was just released.

Holy crap, I'm really glad I waited to hear about how the driver would turn out on the GOG forum before trying it out.

Believe me, nvidia drivers are just as bad. And this is coming from someone who currently has a nvidia card. With my current video card i have already had to format my system once because of a fucked up nvidia driver (not even restoring the system worked).

That's why i never update my video card's driver unless i really have to. And even then, i always read the Guru3D forum to check if the driver is stable enough. Exactly. Both companies make decent hardware and HORRIBLE software.

Creative is also famous for it's shitty drivers. But to their credit i have to say that they have improved their drivers a lot recently. At least it's not as bad as it was back on the X-Fi days.

I installed them fine, I'm just bummed out Incoming is still busted on these new drivers :(

So was I, but you may be interested in this here. This fix works for me.
I do have to say that Creative is one of those companies that I've never had much of a problem with in the post-DOS era. I know their DOS drivers sucked ass, and most of what I had in the late 90s/2000s was onboard so I can't speak for that (Realtek AC97 - now there's some shitty drivers for you), but I've had my lucky X-Fi Titanium for 7 years now and I've never had any problems with the drivers on that thing.

I tried to update my AMD drivers to fix a Skyrim problem that involved the screen being overcast with dark shadows and lines in certain areas, but it made the game look a lot worse so I had to uninstall them. Any fixes or mods to help with this?

Though I am a fan of Radeon cards, I never immediately update my drivers reguardless of brand, I always wait to hear about regressions and screw ups first, and even then only update if a game I really can't be without decides it doesn't want to work.

Which is fine, just as long as you play recent games that are very popular. When you play older and niche games, it becomes a little more tricky to gather empirical data on regressions and reliability.

Problems tend to arise on a game-by-game basis.

Maybe it's a combination of luck and that I always keep a copy of Win XP installed, but i've notoriously stuck to old drivers over the years and had very few issues that couldn't be solved via patches or tweaks, and I definitely don't play many modern, mainstream games on my PC. My personal experience has shown the more I tried to keep up-to-date with drivers, the more messed up and broken things would become.

But I do understand what you're saying amd I really appreciate you coming on here and warning everyone. I can imagine that If I had a system that only ran Windows 7/8 that I might end up tripping over a lot more hurdles, but I still believe it's a good idea to wait when new drivers come out to see if any major problems arise before making the plunge.

Oh and yeah, the concept of constant changes and bugs needing constant patches is enough to warrant anyone to throw up their arms and say "screw it". Before i would have said "just get a console" but this shit is starting to happen just as much on consoles these days as devs get more and more lazy and reliant on after-sales patching through the ever-present-and-obliviously-reliant-on internet connections. For god sake Forza 5 required a mandatory day 1 download of the rest of the freaking base game because it wasn't ready for release.

Thanks for the heads up, I have a 5450 and I hate updating the drivers on the pos, they always seem to cause more problems than they solve.

i never install the new drivers, because they usually buggy.
wait with the install some months after the release.

Check the manufacturer of the board itself and pull drivers from their site only.

I think the two responsible for making Radeon cards are Diamond Stealth and Sapphire

Mine is made by Sapphire who are offering this release
Feb 13, 2014 /Catalyst V13.12c /launched in 2/12/2014 /Windows 8.1 64-bit /V13.12c

http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/downloads/?pid=1218&psn=0006&lid=1&os=15

I never did understand why AMD insisted on producing sloppy drivers for their product when they're affiliates who actually manufactured the boards know exactly what they're doing.

If anything AMD's site should just directly link to them.

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Ironically, shortly after posting that I was getting a key lock screwing up Windows. Tapping on my D-Input game pad stopped it for a second but still not sure if it was result of the actual game pad.

I found a few odd folders under Apps and also noticed that Hydra executables were running in Task Manager. They never have been previously and I didn't even think that I had ATI's HydraVision installed in the first place.

Check these two links. I simply deleted the two HydraDM executables and I'm not even sure how 'official' they are. Apparently they can be used like key capturing software.

http://www.file.net/process/hydradm.exe.html

http://www.file.net/process/hydramd.exe.html

And yes - I did recently install 64-bit Catalyst to make sure I had the 64-bit version installed after updating my OS not so long ago.