On the Area forums, a customer reported that Softimage memory usage would keep increasing until the software either froze or crashed. All he had to do was keep moving points. This happened both on Windows 7 and Vista.
Eventually he resolved the problem by rolling back to an older version (June 09) of the display driver for his [uncertified] ATi Radeon HD 4870 card.
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Because the title of this post is broad towards ATI drivers, I wanted to highlight and note that the card in question was a “gaming card” and NOT a workstation card. The drivers ATI produces for gaming cards are not the same as their modified drivers for workstation cards.
I have thoroughly tested ATI’s FireGL V7600 and FirePro V8700 workstation cards with Softimage versions 7.5, 2010, and 2010 SP1 in a Vista 64 Ultimate, Core i7 environment without any problems or memory leaks.
For image accuracy and environment stability, workstation cards are what you need to be using for your 3D work, not a gaming card.
And in my personal opinion and experience, ATI workstation cards run just as well (if not better) and are more cost effective than the Nvidia workstation cards. If you look at Tom’s workstation benchmarks you will see that the ATI FirePro v8700 smokes comparable Nvidia cards in the majority of tests.
I added “Radeon” to the title to make it clearer.
Re: added Radeon. Good deal… Thanks!
For added reading to viewers of this post who want to know more about workstation cards vs. gaming cards… I also found this recent article on the Icrontic site where the reviewer (a user of Softimage 7.5) pits an ATI FirePro V8750 vs. an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX and the gaming card gets thoroughly eaten alive.
http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/ati_firepro_v8750/2/
Just wanted to get two more helpful links in here that demonstrate why a workstation card is superior to a gaming card for 3D work.
Radeon HD 5870 vs FirePro V8750 – http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/perspective-the-radeon-hd-5870-vs-the-firepro-v8750/
The REAL difference between workstation and desktop GPUs – http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/the-real-difference-between-workstation-and-desktop-gpus/