Aere ATI drivers for AGP really bad?

[CG man]

Tried installing an AGp ATi card on my computer and none of the drivers work and done a full day of research and trouble shooting. When I do a search for the problem I find loads of forum topics about how its pure luck if you find a working ATI driver and working ones are not 100% stable.

This aint a trouble shooter question just wanted to know what other thaught of ATI drivers and their experiences with them.

 

[PC eye]

Back in 2004 I went with the first ATI card used here seeing an ATI Radeon 9550 256mb AGP card on an old Spcket A build. That saw the 9600 chip on that model as well. The best version of the Catalyst Control Center for gaming turned out to be the 5.11 release.

Too often ATI prior to being bought out by AMD(Advanced Micro Devices) would release only so many updates for a series of cards. The Catalyst 5.xx versions were for the Radeon 9xxx series. Past the 6.5 wouldn't be usable. ATI then dropped support for that line entirely prior to seeing the PCI-Express 2xxx models.

Here I've continued to see ATI driven cards on the builds that followed including the present with the HD 2600XT 512mb model in use. The one main problem found with ATI drivers especially with the AGP cards is the MOM implementation error where you have to use the uninstaller first in order to reinstall any update due to first seeing a bad install.