Date:
Thursday , September 02, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
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ATI CATALYST Control Center

Today ATI is launching a brand new piece of software as part of their CATALYST suite that is set to make your life easier when it comes to configuring your ATI Radeon video card. Read inside to see what ATI has in store for you.

Introduction:

It’s not often that we do a write-up on a new driver software package for video cards. We only cover the major releases that will have a significant impact on end users. This is one of those times.

ATI has come a very long way from the days of old. If you remember back to the pre-Radeon 8500 days, headaches and ATI drivers were two things that went hand in hand. ATI drivers were not really known for their stability, compatibility, or performance. In fact, some drivers didn’t even support all the features of the hardware at launch time. Case in point, the Radeon 8500 at launch did not support SMOOTHVISION Anti-Aliasing because of the drivers. But it was during the life cycle of the Radeon 8500 that ATI made a huge change in the way they handled drivers, and since then ATI drivers have gotten tremendously better overall.

It first started with a new driver version in November of 2001 which finally brought full support for the features of the Radeon 8500. Not only did it finally have full hardware support, but it also improved performance and stability a great deal. While this driver was the start of the turning point for ATI, it wasn’t until June of 2002 that ATI made their grandest driver package improvement of all with the introduction of the ATI CATALYST driver suite.

The ATI CATALYST driver suite was more then just a new driver; it included a whole new control panel and a new commitment for frequent driver releases. We have seen how ATI has fulfilled this promise of frequent driver updates, as currently there are new driver releases about once a month. The CATALYST introduction in July of 2002 also brought with it a brand new control panel which we have all come to know. It allowed easier recognition of features and much more customized control over the features you wanted to manipulate. The CATALYST release also heralded dramatic performance increases for the Radeon 8500 line and has continued ever since, optimizing for each new generation of graphics card.

While the CATALYST suite was a huge step for ATI, they have not been resting on that initial design. They are committed to improving the CATALYST suite, and today they are launching a brand new control panel for the CATALYST suite known as the ATI CATALYST Control Center which you may hear called ACE or CCC for short.

CATALYST Control Center:

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The new CATALYST Control Center introduces a completely new and intuitive user interface with the goal of it being easy to customize and provide new features. The whole interface has been redesigned to help people understand what the features do. The Control Center is packed full of new features such as wizards, profile settings, automatic update capability, application manager, and new controls. ATI has made this Control Center highly customizable so that end users can tweak it to their liking.

"The CATALYST™ Control Center architecture allows developers and end-users to easily customize the CATALYST™ Control Center from both a cosmetic and feature- design perspective. Using the CATALYST ™ Control Center Software Developers Kit (SDK), developers are able to create new skins, develop new features, or even design a completely customized user interface."

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Because this is a completely redesigned application, ATI was able to choose what platform to program the interface in. They decided that Microsoft’s .NET framework was the best option to go with for their interface. Realizing that Longhorn is based on the .NET framework, ATI is building this interface with the future in mind, which allows for easy plug-in extensions. This means that one of the requirements for running this Control Center is that you need Microsoft’s .NET version 1.1 to be installed first.

"The architecture of the CATALYST™ Control Center is based on the client-server model, and uses a Microsoft® .NET framework as its foundation. The .NET framework allows the CATALST™ Control Center to be very extensible, allowing third-party organizations to easily develop and integrate their own software features."

"The CATALYST™ Control Center run-time (which could include 3rd party plug-ins), acts as the server component and provides the interface between the display driver and the client component, also known as the CATALYST™ Control Center user-interface (which could be ATI only, 3rd party only, or a combination of both)."

"The .NET framework allows developers to create new content for the CATALYST™ Control Center at a much quicker pace as they will be able to code in whatever programming language they are most familiar with (C#, C++, C, Visual Basic, Java, etc.)."