Solution for crash with Radeon + AMD Athlon

[zapatapon]

I thought I'd just post a solution I found for a Sam&Max crash problem with my Radeon card that has been nagging me for months. Searching in the forum I have noticed quite a few threads that could possibly be related to this problem.
Just in case it can help someone else...

If you are unfortunate enough to have the following configuration:

* An ATI Radeon AGP card
* An AMD socket A CPU such as an Athlon, with real frequency higher than 1900 Mhz (this last point is crucial)
* ATI Catalyst drivers 8.6 or higher

Then due to an unfortunate bug in recent ATI drivers, you may be experiencing systematic crashes in some 3D applications (blue screen of death)

There now exists an unofficial patch for this bug, see
http://www.vgaforum.com/showthread.php?t=21035

It worked extremely well for me, suppressing all the crashes. The frequently recommended solution of installing the Omega drivers also works because those are based on an older (and bug free) version of the official ATI drivers. However, since on my system Omega drivers caused problems with other games (under OpenGL), I found the above patch to be preferable.