Two months ago I wrote a blog post "ATI and NVIDIA: Making Friends out of Enemies" where (among other things) I wrote:

Developing software for ATI cards is (okay — was) a nightmare. In 2009 ATI quietly introduced two changes in their drivers which made previously perfectly functional and compatible applications to crash (if you are curious: with Catalyst 9.2 or 9.3 they’ve changed names of supporting DLLs bundled with drivers; with Catalyst 9.9 or 9.10 they’ve probably changed format of underlying binary so that anything compiled and linked in with earlier versions caused a driver to crash).

Well, with the release of Catalyst 10.4 drivers ATI is again at it. This time problem only affects users who have display adapters from different vendors in their computer. Applications utilizing ATI Stream will work on such configurations just fine with Catalyst 10.3, but once you upgrade to 10.4, applications will crash with faulting module being aticaldd.dll, a part of ATI Display driver. Kinda embarrassing, I would say. Regression testing is really something one with millions of users should consider.

Users of our software relying on ATI hardware accelerations (as well as any other ATI Stream enabled applications) should not update to 10.4 if ATI Readeon is not the only card in their computer.