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I have a Dell Studio 15 (the 1555 model). It has an Mobility Radeon HD 4570 in it with 512MB of dedicated memory – a fine mobile graphics chip, “good enough” performance for the fairly casual 3D gaming I do on my laptop. It runs The Sims 3 just fine, for instance.

There’s only one problem. Drivers.

If you have a notebook with Nvidia graphics, you can probably get drivers directly from Nvidia. There are a few holdout companies, but a great many have agreed. Nvidia had to re-architect their notebook drivers to update the important driver parts but leave the special OEM features/settings alone. They did so, and now you can get drivers for most Nvidia-based notebooks whenever Nvidia updates ‘em, which is often.

My notebook drivers, and this is true of everyone with an ATI-based card in their notebook, has to come from the manufacturer. Dell’s most recent drivers are from February, and there are no Windows 7 drivers at all. What’s the point of ATI releasing monthly drivers if my OEM doesn’t?

If you go to game.amd.com to get the latest graphics drivers, you won’t find any for notebooks. There appear to be graphics drivers at support.amd.com, but don’t be fooled. If you choose Windows XP or Vista (32 or 64-bit) as your OS, you’ll only see drivers listed for the Mobility Radeon 9600 to X1800. Old, old GPUs. Choose Windows 7, which is what I’m running, and there are drivers for the Mobility Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series. Horray!

But wait…those aren’t really the drivers. If you download and install that package, you’ll find that it updates the HDMI drivers and stuff, but not the actual main graphics drivers. And it won’t install Catalyst Control Center.

Enter Mobility Modder.net, an awesome tool from the folks at Driverheaven. The way it works is simple. You go to game.amd.com and download the latest full desktop Catalyst drivers for whichever version of Windows you have, as if your notebook were a desktop system with a desktop graphics card. Then you run the downloaded .exe so that it unpacks everything and starts the installation program – but you don’t actually install the drivers. It won’t work, anyway. You just wanted to unpack them. Then you run Mobility Modder.net (it has some special requirements, like having UAC disabled in Vista, but it’s not hard at all). You point the program to the folder the ATI drivers unpacked themselves to (usually C:\ATI\some other stuff). Then it churns away, modifying the driver installation files to recognize your mobile graphics part.

After it has done it’s thing, just go to C:\ATI\wherever your drivers are and run the setup.exe program. It’ll go through the installer and install the driver and Catalyst Control Center and everything else just as if you had a desktop graphics card. Reboot, and you’re good to go.

I’m especially happy today because, as I said, I have a Dell notebook running Windows 7 with a Mobility Radeon HD 4570 card. Up until yesterday, Mobility Modder.net didn’t support the 4000 series of notebook products. The new 1.2.1.0 update adds this support. I just ran it and it worked like a charm. Drivers installed, CCC works, everything is beautiful.

It’s a real shame ATI notebook users have to go through this nonsense. I know the big OEMs push back against graphics driver updates, but I just don’t get it. I can go to the Synaptic site and download new touchpad drivers, and they’ll install just fine. Same with audio drivers for my notebook. Why the special hate for vendor-supplied graphics drivers, OEMs? Why can’t you add value at no cost to you by letting me make sure I have as few bugs and as high performance as possible?

Until ATI works this out with the OEMs, and they desperately need to do so, Mobility Modder.net continues to save their bacon. If it didn’t exist, I doubt I’d buy a notebook with ATI graphics. I would have thought twice about the Dell I purchased if I realized at the time that Mobility Modder.net didn’t support the 4000 series.

So go forth, fellow ATI-powered notebook owners, and update ye some drivers.