Omega Drivers

Omega Drivers
Type Private Company
Founded 2004
Headquarters Puerto Rico
Key people Angel Trinidad
Website www.omegadrivers.net

Omega Drivers are unofficial, third-party device drivers for ATI and nVidia graphics cards, created by Angel Trinidad. They differ from the official drivers in that they offer more customization and extra features. They are compatible with all ATI graphics cards and all nVidia cards that use Detonator drivers.

The drivers are tweaked versions of those officially released by ATI and nVidia, mainly using registry tweaks and offering an alternative installer. They are not custom drivers compiled from source code.

From the website:

The purpose of the Omega Drivers is to provide gamers with an alternate set of drivers, ones that have more options and features than the original sets. The drivers contain optimizations, extra features (like OC capabilities), more resolutions and internal tweaks that can give them the edge in a gaming environment over the normal drivers, which are often tailored for synthetic benchmarks. All Omega driver sets are tested (unless noted) by myself in my own PC or in an alternate PC (in the case of the Nvidia drivers) to ensure maximum compatibility and reliability.[1]

Contents

ATI driver features

The Omega ATI driver is based on ATI's Catalyst drivers. The driver is particularly notable for resolving 3D compatibility problems affecting past versions of the ATI drivers (versions 7.8-7.12) and some AGP cards.

The driver includes various third party utilities including 'MultiRes' (from EnTech Taiwan) and ATI Tray Tools tweaking utility.

Reception

The drivers are recognized by ATI as the best alternative drivers on the Internet according to Terry Makedon:

"ATI supports the enthusiast community wholly. Omega Drivers are in fact a good example of ATI’s user community at its best. What they are in principle are CATALYST drivers with different settings enabled via registry keys and other such methods. This provides users an alternative to ATI’s CATALYST default settings. While there are a few different modification drivers out in the community our relationship with the creator of the Omega Drivers is of the highest working standard. The author of these drivers is part of the CATALYST beta driver testing team, and also in direct contact with ATI. In fact we would go so far as to say that if a user chooses to go the mod driver route, they go with the Omega Drivers."[2]

nVidia has previously attempted legal action against some versions of Omega Drivers; the company has since allowed Omega Drivers for nVidia cards to be made.[3]

End of Support

On November 2nd, 2011, Angel posted a blog entry stating that due to financial troubles and foreclosure, work on the Omega drivers will be stopped and only news updates will be done "as long as I have somewhere to live".[4]

Notes

  1. ^ "Omega drivers website - About section". http://www.omegadrivers.net/about.php. 
  2. ^ "Interview with ATI's Terry Makedon by Nordic Hardware". http://www.nordichardware.com/Articles/?skrivelse=335&page=1. 
  3. ^ "The case of omega vs. Nvidia". http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.wcm.at/story.php%3Fid%3D5316&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=2&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%2522There%2Bhas%2Bbeen%2Balot%2Bof%2Bdiscussion%2Brecently%2522%2Bnvidia%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG. 
  4. ^ "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish…". http://www.omegadrivers.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=408:so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish&catid=41:omegadriversnet-news&Itemid=74. 

External links