0AMD Radeon Graphics LogoInstalling Mobility Radeon drivers from ATi

Published by & filed under Misc Software. Last updated .

Update: Cata­lyst Mobil­ity drivers are now avail­able for many cards from ATi. (as of Cata­lyst ver­sion 10.3)

It seems to be very dif­fi­cult to obtain reas­on­ably up-to-date drivers for the ATi graph­ics chips in many laptops. This is because the OEMs have asked ATi not to provide gen­er­ic drivers dir­ect to the end user, ostens­ibly to reduce sup­port requests from users with drivers not tested by the OEM’s. This seems per­fectly reas­on­able, but the sad fact is most OEM’s only update the drivers for a new laptop mod­el a few times and soon aban­don it as they con­cen­trate on the next gen­er­a­tion release. For those people try­ing to update their drivers to address a prob­lem or to gain access to new fea­tures there are no clear options. For­tu­nately there are ways around this problem.


The first thing to check out is the Mobil­ity Mod­der which provides users with the abil­ity to patch the reg­u­lar cata­lyst drivers avail­able from AMD. This will solve the issue for 99% of users. In the rare situ­ations where this does­n’t work, or causes a prob­lem the altern­at­ive solu­tion is as follows

  1. Loc­ate some­where to down­load the driver — e.g. for the Mobil­ity Radeon 9700 I was deal­ing with I found the Cata­lyst 9.3 driver on DriversDown.
  2. Run the setup pro­gram to extract the driver (usu­ally to C:\Ati\support\driver_ver)
  3. Use the driver update wiz­ard from device man­ager and manu­ally choose a driver
  4. Point the “have disk” option to the extrac­ted folder
  5. Select the cor­rect adaptor from the long list
  6. Once the driver has installed browse to the extrac­ted folder and find the “ccc” (cata­lyst con­trol cen­ter) folder
  7. Run the setup to install cata­lyst con­trol center

Got some thoughts of your own? Indulge yourself below by commenting! If you would like to subscribe please use the subscribe link on the menu at the top right. You can also share this with your friends by using the social links below. Cheers.

Leave a Reply