Windows Vista and ATI graphics cards have always been well-suited as far as hardware goes. When Windows Vista was first out, there were many driver problems. Although the opinion that many people have of Vista, most if not all of these problems were caused by ATI's driver package.

Catalyst at Release

1. Catalyst is name given to driver package by ATI since 2004. When Windows Vista was out, Catalyst was buggy and lost features that were standard in Windows XP version of driver suite. Amongst the lost features was full support for many graphics cards in particular applications and OpenGL a 3D graphics programming library. Also, 3D performance was clearly bad than the Windows XP drivers. Some games, like "Prey," wouldn't run at all.

Windows Vista at Release

2. As Catalyst drivers hold lion's share of the responsibility for problems with ATI cards under Vista, Vista itself is not completely innocent. Vista utilizes a fully rewritten graphics model XP compatible drivers are useless with Vista. This necessary graphics card company to write completely new drivers for latest operating system. Also, Windows Vista introduced DirectX 10, which was not compatible with earlier versions, needs new code for drivers.

Catalyst Today

3. The Catalyst drivers have matured very much in the time as the original release in 2007. OpenGL support is much better, and drivers are more optimized. The latest release, 9.10 still has some flashing problems when being installed, but performance problems for both OpenGL and DirectX have been resolved. There are some errors remains, but they are game-specific.

Windows Vista Today

4. Vista is now on its second service pack. With the service packs comes DirectX 10.1, which is an incremental update of DirectX 10. Rather than needs full driver rewrite, 10.1 is just a super-set of DirectX 10. All hardware aspects supported in 10 are still supported in 10.1, although if a new card supports the latest aspects, it needs 10.1 to utilize them. Even DirectX 11 is backwards well-suited with DirectX 10 across the board, allowing latest aspects for cards that can use them; or else, it ignores them.

Update Those Drivers

5. Many problems with graphics in Vista are a symptom of using out-of-date drivers. If you never have updated drivers for graphics card, it is not mainly difficult to do. Just go to ATI's website, and utilize dialog that helps to choose proper drivers for graphics card. Not only many problems solved, but overall performance of the graphics card will rise.