Hello people. There is an issue with the new drivers for ATI cards, especially the HD5870 and HD5970 models.

Catalyst 10.6 breaks the work units for DNETC@Home and me and couple of other people have confirmed that it is indeed the new version of Catalyst. We have rolled back to 10.5 and once again all GPU Work Units are getting completed with no real issues.

Please let me explain to those who are not very clued up about when to update your Graphics Card drivers. The most sensible way to do it is.... if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That meaning, if your current drivers are working fine don't update. GPU drivers are probably one of the most fickle updates you will find in computing. The previous version of Catalyst 10.5 are the most stable but even then it took ATI 3 revisions of Catalyst 10.5 to get it right. The driver most stable before 10.5 was actually 9.7 and so you see if you don't need to update, don't update.

If you really want to install version of Catalyst... go 10.5. Performance improvement is minimal but the cards might be a bit quieter, meaning they are running cooler.

If you are more a gamer than a cruncher, still don't go for Catalyst 10.6. It breaks DiRT2 in Steam and that is just one game that me and couple of others managed to prove was ATI Drivers.

To come to this conclusion we flicked between 9.7, 10.5 and 10.6. Using each driver about 3 times each on each of our PCs. We all got the same results with 9.7 and 10.5 being stable. We have informed ATI and although they will likely send out a fix, we do not expect to see until 1 month's time. Because you know, this is ATI.

Same advice about updating nVidia drivers apply. Happy crunching Boincers! :D