0Installing Mobility Radeon drivers from ATi

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