Ati beta drivers?

[OBLIVIONLORD]

I've been an ATI user for many years and noticed that ATI only releases drivers once every month. This is good and bad though. If there are any issues to address then they will only be taken care of once the driver is released which is a whole month in between times. What I love about Nvidia's driver team is that they offer official drivers every now and then but, most importantly their beta team attends to issues Asap deals with stability and performance. If there is 5 or 10fps gain from a simple driver update then you know you will have the option to use the Beta since they are persistent on demand. I'm not terribly concerned about WHQL certified drivers since they don't guarantee a perfect driver but, just what's been tested to run adequately on hardware in Windows.

My question is.. does ATI have a Beta team and if so where can you download drivers from them?

[copernicus]

you can sign up for the catalyst beta tester program (http://ati.amd.com/products/catalyst/betatester.html) here.
idk if theres any other way to get ati's beta drivers, someone else might know.

[OBLIVIONLORD]

I guess they are taking the utmost extreme caution with their drivers but, what's questioning is why would they go through all of this? Have there been recent issues with beta drivers causing so much havok in Windows where you just couldn't remedy it by uninstalling the beta and reinstalling one that you know works like an official one if all else fails? I'm also an owner of a modern Nvidia card and all the issues that I see on forums or even myself are simply resolved by uninstalling the faulty one and reinstalling one that works. I just don't understand the logic in this especially when Nvidia has more assets to lose if it were that much of an issue to take such drastic extremes for beta drivers.

[copernicus]

yea i agree seems a little excessive to me.
a simple disclaimer with an i agree checkbox would suffice you would think.

[OBLIVIONLORD]

It could possibly be to discourage people from taking advantage of it this way they can save costs by having only so large of a staff to work on the drivers without the need for the public demanding beta drivers. This however is unfair to people that buy Ati's product when the opposing company makes the process of using beta drivers much easier to take advantage of without having to Mail out for it. There are benefits to beta drivers as well as some flaws but, that's expected. At least when a game comes out, Nvidia will most likely attend to the performance of the driver and release a beta within release date or a day or so afterwards. That I think is very beneficial since these videocards are mainly used for gaming. You know that if Nvidia completly stopped offering Beta drivers then their reputation would really go down.