Why does Catalyst remove existing Realtek drivers?

Yeah I don't get it... I just added an HD 5670 to my HTPC #2 (bedroom) which happens to have a Realtek ALC888S chipset on the board and of course the drivers were installed and working. Then when I installed the latest CCC/Catalyst driver after putting the 5670 in, well, the built-in Realtek is suddenly nowhere to be found. (HDMI from the card is working fine though.)

Not that it matters on this particular machine (everything can go through HDMI) but...what is up with that LOL.

Then I remembered the same thing happened when I put an HD 4830 in my HTPC #1 (living room) way back when.

The weird thing is, if you reinstall the Realtek driver it then gives you back your old outputs (analog, S/PDIF) and the HDMI output from the vid card seems to be coupled in the driver control panel as if it were all part of the same "soundcard". The only difference is once you install the Realtek driver it removes the Windows sound enhancements (like room correction and bass management) from your audio properties and replaces them with the [inferior] Realtek versions.

I'm surprised the ATI driver doesn't just install it so it's integrated to begin with because doesn't this leave a lot of people scratching their heads as to where there on-board sound went after they install CCC?

Well it works fine, but you have to re-install the Realtek driver afterwards to regain the on-board. At least that happened to me on both machines, one with the aforementioned 888S and another with an 889. Install CCC, gone is the on-board. Weird eh?

On the one with the 888S I'm not even going to bother though, because I don't really need to use the other outputs.