I came across this, don't know if 5punkers are aware of it but thought it might be of interest.
The purpose of the Omega Drivers is to provide gamers with an alternate set of drivers, ones that have more options and features than the original sets. The drivers contain optimizations, extra features (like OC capabilities), more resolutions and internal tweaks that can give them the edge in a gaming environment over the normal drivers, which are often tailored for synthetic benchmarks. All Omega driver sets are tested (unless noted) by myself in my own PC or in an alternate PC (in the case of the Nvidia drivers) to ensure maximum compatibility and reliability.
I haven't tried these, I have no idea if it's any good, I've never heard of them before and I don't recommend using anything other than official drivers. So it's not my fault if it turns your washing blue, your hair falls out or the hole in the ozone layer gets bigger.
I used them on my old Nvidia 6800 and noticed a significant performance increase when running 3d mark, but I haven't tried them yet on my ati x1950pro.
I think numerous sites actually suggest the ATI Omega Drivers are better than the official ATI drivers, so I might give them a go and get back to you with the results.
Basically they are official driver sets modified to run best with a large catalogue of games
I use them on my laptop because Dell's drivers are complete shit and ATi doesn't have any reference drivers for my GPU. They're OK, but in my experience the difference between them and Catalyst has been really small.
deject wrote:I use them on my laptop because Dell's drivers are complete shit and ATi doesn't have any reference drivers for my GPU. They're OK, but in my experience the difference between them and Catalyst has been really small.
I had problems with them on my ThinkPad. They did indeed massively increase performance (Catalysts aren't updated for a card as old as mine), but occasionally the screen would totally mess up, and the machine developed serious problems with suspending. I ended up getting the motherboard replaced (under warranty fortunately, and there was another more serious problem besides - that also ended up not being motherboard-related) before I worked out what the problem was.
Mainly because IBM haven't updated their ATI X1440 drivers to, um, the version before the current one of Catalyst.
Oh, and they give me a nice performance boost with (apparently) no system instability. The overclocking is OK too, though I had to go though many an artifacted screen/thermal shutdown routine to find the right GPU/memory frequencies.
Tried overclocking the CPU too, no dice. But having HMC horse the CPU into max performance mode (rather than dynamic switching mode) helped a bit too......
They're alright, but they can go kapoot if you mess them up.
I generally stick with the offical ones unless I've got problems or an older card, though I do trust the omega drivers, apparently the dude making them is/was a worker at ATI anyway who's worked on the offical cat drivers.
