So, yeah, I'm just gonna link to my Steam Forums post instead of retyping the whole thing here.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=18459802

I have a sapphire Radeon and a couple of games won't run at all with the newest drivers. I had to drop back to the 10.1 package (if you're using an HD card) in order for them to work.

The games that will not work on my system, no matter what drivers I use, are as follows

A Farewell to Dragons
Vampire the Masquerade - Bloodlines
Aztaka
Aquaria
STALKER Clear Sky

A lot of other games HAVE worked on my system though.

I've heard Radeons have problems with Source games but I have Half Life 2 on my computer and it works just fine. I haven't tried installing TF2 (I have the Orange Box) yet so maybe I'll try to run that tonight and see if I have the same problem.

I always turn off Catalyst AI. And I set every other option to "do what the application calls for". It cuts down on software conflicts, and gives me peace of mind.

@carnival73

It wasn't the games themselves that were conflicting with the utility, it was something in the Steam Client. I know this because it wasn't until after the client update that they began crashing. I had been using the utility prior to it.

That's somehow funny, didn't Valve start sending out AMD driver updates through Steam? I think I saw a message about that, didn't opt in to it though.

It doesn't update them automatically; you can find an option for it under the Steam menu.

It will DOWNLOAD them automatically, however, in anticipation of you wanting to update when you click "Check for Driver Updates".

Ah, useful information; I wasn't aware of that. I guess I should check whatever folder that is when I'm next looking to do an update.

Someone here suggested turning off having community active in-game.....it worked for all of one or two attempts to load Bloodlines and then Bloodlines was back to crashing again.

What I'm wondering is if there's something about the Steam client that is crashing my games that weren't bought from Steam or have nothing to do with the client at all.

Does anyone know where to download the hotfixes for the driver files for radeon cards? And are they officially supported or made by amd/ati or not? Just asking because I don't see a link on the main driver download page or the optional downloads page/tab.

When I go to ATI/AMD's site and search for my driver it only pulls up the latest hotfix and doesn't specify rather or not it is for an PCI or AGP card.

Going to Sapphire's site it only pulls up a listing of hotifxes that have been released for the past two years. There's no listing for a stable driver and if there was, I imagine that it would've been from 2008.

I meant do you get hotfixes from your video card manufacturer's website or from amd's site? I wanna try them out to be honest and don't know where to go.....my card is also Gigabyte brand radeon btw.

I'm not sure if Gigabyte is offering anything different but the drivers that Sapphire host are the exact same driver's on ATI's site.

But yeah, I usually download from Sapphire because they have them all laid out so that I can pick and choose. The latest hotfix for HD cards is a mess and shuts off access to a couple of my games completely so I've been fishing around and trying out last year's drivers.

I've heard some geeks on the net create and release custom driver releases for ATI/nVidia cards.......or at least I think I keard about it somewheres.....maybe they could help you.

Well, so far so good for right now. This 10.1 pack is doing good and has only messed up Aquaira. Of course i still can't run Bloodines or A Farewell to Dragons but I think that those issues have more going on than just my video card.