No.
Up to Blitz3D V1.88, everything works nicely with any ATI card and any Catalyst driver.
After Blitz3D V1.88, with any Catalyst driver after v4.7 there is a drastic framerate drop on ATI cards.
So, something which has been modified in Blitz3D V1.89 creates conflicts with every ATI card with reasonably updated Catalyst drivers.
As you can see, it is another matter entirely.
To summarize, any Blitz3D version after v1.88 is less compatible with the majority of ATI cards.
If you are coding a game which don't stress the machine it's not a problem, otherwise if the framerate is seriously low it's not simple to ask the users to change their video card to a nVidia or to revert to a ridiculously old - current version is 7.4 - Catalyst driver (usually it's the other way around).
To me it's just striking that no one noticed it before (it's just that no B3D game is heavily using 3D graphics, nor using many properly animated 3D models).
Anyway, your point makes no sense since Blitz3D v1.89 is newer than catalyst drivers v4.7 (which were released on 2004-07-08, while B3D v1.89 timestamp reads 2005-02-24). And even if so, it would have been good practice to adapt the engine to the latest drivers, since three years of ATI updates didn't revert the situation. I just think that at the time Mark Sibly didn't notice the issue, simple as that.
Up to Blitz3D V1.88, everything works nicely with any ATI card and any Catalyst driver.
After Blitz3D V1.88, with any Catalyst driver after v4.7 there is a drastic framerate drop on ATI cards.
So, something which has been modified in Blitz3D V1.89 creates conflicts with every ATI card with reasonably updated Catalyst drivers.
As you can see, it is another matter entirely.
To summarize, any Blitz3D version after v1.88 is less compatible with the majority of ATI cards.
If you are coding a game which don't stress the machine it's not a problem, otherwise if the framerate is seriously low it's not simple to ask the users to change their video card to a nVidia or to revert to a ridiculously old - current version is 7.4 - Catalyst driver (usually it's the other way around).
To me it's just striking that no one noticed it before (it's just that no B3D game is heavily using 3D graphics, nor using many properly animated 3D models).
Anyway, your point makes no sense since Blitz3D v1.89 is newer than catalyst drivers v4.7 (which were released on 2004-07-08, while B3D v1.89 timestamp reads 2005-02-24). And even if so, it would have been good practice to adapt the engine to the latest drivers, since three years of ATI updates didn't revert the situation. I just think that at the time Mark Sibly didn't notice the issue, simple as that.