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Delivering on promises made last week, ATI has released a new driver update for owners of their Radeon and Rage 128 cards. The update should work for both Mac OS 9.x and 8.6, though it's only been fully tested on Mac OS 9. It should address some of the issues PCI Radeon owners have been reporting, including an occasional black screen instead the main menu of Quake III: Arena.

The 1.11 update will also fix a problem with using the Radeon in a B&W machine and keeping the existing the Rage 128 in one of the 33MHz PCI slots at the same time. The download includes Apple's OpenGL 1.2.1, which is required for the 1.11 drivers to work correctly.

ATI has posted some Release Notes which never made it in the final Radeon packaging. They cover the minimum and recommended systems for running the Radeon (which notes OS 9 as a requirement), extensions which will be installed for the card, and other issues such as support for Mac clone systems. According to what ATI's Chris Bentley told IMG last week, look for a major driver update in the future which will support more advanced Radeon features such as FSAA and bump mapping. While ATI has been quite relaxed about their driver release schedule in the past (!) it seems the presence of first 3dfx and then NVIDIA on their turf has indeed inspired them to crank up Mac driver support; thus we don't expect another six-month wait before the next driver revision.

Head to Macgamefiles to grab the update, which only weighs in at about 4MB. And be sure to give your own rating/review on the MGF page for others to see, and discuss any issues (or fixes) you discover on the Troubleshooting and Hardware forums here at IMG.

Download 1.11 Radeon/Rage 128 Driver Update

ATI Radeon/Rage 128 Driver Page

ATI Radeon Release Notes

ATI

Radeon AGP

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