Date:
Thursday , June 13, 2002
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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ATI Catalyst - Part 1

A new driver suite from ATI, check out what all the buzz is about in Part 1 of our look at Catalyst.

continued...

Wrapping Up Part 1

We are sure you are just as surprised as we are at the fact that the OpenGL scores we benchmarked were actually a tad slower or the same with the Catalyst drivers compared to the previous 6071 drivers in XP. 3DMark2001SE showed a remarkable performance increase, but outside of this single benchmark there was little that needed to be noted. Our expectations were surely higher in terms of frame rate performance.

There are a few possibilities that might have held us back which we will look at in Part 2 of our Catalyst testing. The drivers we have benchmarked today are in fact RC3 build 524 of the Catalyst driver. The final build is now available from www.ati.com, however, at the time of our testing we did not have the final build that is released today. Perhaps either only Direct3D or OpenGL is optimized at this time. In part 2 that is one thing we will test is to see if the final build shows any kind of performance difference.

The other possibility could be how ATI set up the drivers at default. When we benchmarked the 6071 drivers, we did not change anything in the control panels except to make sure Vsync was disabled for D3D and OpenGL. The same was also done for the Catalyst drivers. The default settings in the Catalyst drivers could be different than those of the 6071 drivers. There are some more options in the Catalyst driver control panel that are not available with the 6071 drivers. So perhaps image quality has been increased more which would sacrifice performance. In part 2 of our look into the Catalyst we are going to go over all these new features in the D3D and OGL control panels and we wanted to only go into this detail with the final drivers as it is certainly a lot of work. We will examine them to see exactly what they change in terms of IQ and how it effects performance. We will also do some comparisons of Smoothvision and Anisotropic to see if those have been improved in IQ or performance. We plan to also compare the filtering types and see if Mip-Mapping and Trilinear filtering image quality has been improved. It will be a much more in-depth analysis with the final build of the Catalyst drivers which should let you know just exactly how much better they are, if any.

ATI is changing, that much we think we can all agree on. They are more aggressive than ever in getting the end user what they want. They had serious driver problems in the past, but it is safe to say those problems are gone...for the moment. While the Radeon 8500 was not a GeForce3 killer at its introduction because of driver implementation, it's certainly closer to that now. If ATI could have implemented such robust drivers at the market launch of the 8500, the video card landscape might be a bit different from today. In fact, the 8500 is riding right up on the GeForce4 Ti 4200's heels. If you've been reluctant in the past to try out the 8500 because of driver problems, you may want to give it another shot now days. The 8500 can be found for bargain basement prices and it really delivers beyond bargain basement performance.

So outside of branding their drivers and making things easier for the n00bie, we see little to get excited about with one deeply hidden exception. This Catalyst release seems to be more of a PR tool than anything else when viewed through the eyes of the hardcore gamer. This is not a bad thing, though. As ATI draws more attention to their driver set, they are certainly putting more pressure on themselves to produce better drivers at a better pace. So in Catalyst, we see a commitment from ATI to give the hardware community better driver support. Instead of just talking about it this time, they are doing it; and that is more of a commitment than we have ever gotten from ATI in the past. And after all of this drawing attention to themselves and their drivers, I would say they now have no choice but to bring their driver support up a notch and carry on in the same way.

Catalyst definitely paves the way for future ATI GPUs and better community acceptance of their overall product line. Good going ATI. Now let's see you keep your money where your mouth is!

Catalyst v02.1 download Links for the Radeon Series:

WinXP; Win2K; WinME; Win98; or use the ATi Driver Search Page for yourself to find what best suits your OS and hardware.

Stay tuned for Part 2...