![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , September 02, 2004
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
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.
Installation:
Installation is just as easy as previous CATALYST packages have been. You run the executable and if you select a custom install you can check or uncheck the components you want to install. As you can see above, the driver is included along with the classic control panel as well as the new Control Center. Yes, if you don't like the new Control Center, you do not have to use it. You can stick with the classic control panel if you wish. Also, if you have already installed the new Control Center, you can uninstall only it and revert back to the classic control panel. Note that the Control Center is a separate piece of software from the driver, just like the classic control panel is.
After you have rebooted post-installation, there are three very easy ways to access the new Control Center without having to go all the way to advanced display properties. There is an icon created on your desktop that when double clicked will take you directly to the Control Center. There is also a shortcut added at the top of the right click desktop menu. Lastly, you can get to it by right clicking the icon in the system tray. One minor annoyance we have witnessed is that the new shortcut is at the top of the right click menu, right where the “Arrange Icons By” menu used to be. On many occasions we have gone to arrange our icons, placing the cursor where the menu used to be, clicking, and accidentally launching the Control Center. In our opinion, a better placement would be more towards the bottom of the menu. Nevertheless, it is very convenient having all of these quick options to launch the Control Center.
The Layout:
There are four main sections that ATI has identified in the Control Center. The toolbar at the top is used to select various Control Center configuration options. The left pane, shown in green here, is used to select the features of the video card while the large right side pane is used to configure the settings of those features. There is also a little space at the bottom for customized customer branding. This design is an intuitive one that allows you to configure options all from one window instead of having several tabs that the previous control panel had.
When you launch the CATALYST Control Center for the first time you are presented with the welcome screen shown, which is presented in Macromedia’s Flash. This view is the “Standard View” setting which is intended for novices. It can provide information such as new features in the Control Center, product messaging, and even has customizability to design your own welcome screen with the SDK.
The Toolbar:
Views:
There are three different view types available in the Control Center. The default setting is the Standard View which is designed for novice users who need very basic access to the graphics card's features in an easy to understand format. The Advanced View is for advanced users who want to see all of the graphics options available for their video card. The Custom View is a selection that lets users decide what options and features they want to see in their Control Center. By customizing the control center, you can, for example, take out all of the video configuration menus and make it to where the only visible menus are the 3D settings, or vice versa.
An example of customizing the views is shown above. The first screenshot shows the default advanced menu selections that are available, but in the second screenshot above you can see that I have customized the menus to show only the ones that are beneficial to me. This helps reduce menu clutter and make things quick and easy to go and change settings, showing only what you need.
Hotkeys:
There is a hotkeys manager built into the Control Center which allows you to assign a key to any feature of the Control Center or the video card. These can be very useful because you can even assign keys to launch user defined profiles. Check out these Hotkey actions that could be assigned to our X800Pro: restore optimal quality, performance or balanced setting, increase or decrease 3D gamma, increase or decrease 3D brightness, increase or decrease 3D contrast, increase or decrease overlay contrast and brightness and gamma and saturation and hue, restore overlay defaults, enable or disable VPU recover, enable or disable OVERDRIVE, and pause/resume 3D preview. All of those functions can be bound to a hot key to activate. Suffice it to say, the hotkeys manager is very robust and allows you to make quick access to Control Center or video card functions via keyboard commands.
Profiles:
From the profiles toolbar menu you can create, save, and load Control Center settings for the Windows desktop or any application or game. You have different ways to launch profiles as well. You can choose to assign a profile to a hot key, make it a system tray menu, make it from the profiles menu, or even create a desktop shortcut to activate the profile and application.
Here is how it works. First go and set all of the options you want in the Control Center for the game or application in question. For example, let’s say I want to set Application Preference for Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering for when I play DOOM 3. I would go and select those settings under the 3D menu and choose any other settings I want, such as enabling VSYNC or disabling Multi-Monitors. Clicking on the Profiles button at the top would be the next step. Enter a name for the profile at the top and include a description if you choose. At the bottom tab, under Composition, choose to apply all of the Control Center settings to the profile or just select particular ones. When that is done, go to the Activation tab and choose how the profile should be applied. In this case, I have decided to make it a shortcut on the desktop. Next, go to the Application tab and select the path where the application is, which in this case is DOOM 3. Once saved, an icon is created on the desktop. Just like any icon, you can right click on it and go to properties and change the icon picture if you wish. Now whenever the icon is double clicked, the profile will be applied and the game will be launched. That's the idea, at least.
Unfortunately, there does seem to be an issue when we tried this scenario to launch DOOM 3 with the settings shown above. We created a shortcut for the game on the desktop as shown, went to double click it instead of running DOOM 3, and it returned a “DOOM 3 has encountered a problem and needs to close” error window. Whatever we tried we could not get it to point where when you launched the profile it also launched DOOM 3.
We contacted ATI and they responded with this explanation regarding DOOM 3:
"For Doom3 if you use the desktop short cut created by ID the profile does not work. If you go to the actual game directory find the .exe, create a desktop shortcut and link the profile to the shortcut it works. The actual games are looking in the ACE directory for the .exe when they try and start which is causing the issue."
"We will have this issue resolved in a subsequent release of CATALYST Control Center."
Therefore, for the moment, if you want to set a profile for DOOM 3 make sure you follow the above procedures or you can also simply not select the Application path in the Application tab and just make it to where you can activate the profile and then launch DOOM 3 from its normal game shortcut.
We also had an issue with UT2004. Every time we double clicked the desktop shortcut it created for the profile the game would launch in a windowed mode. But if we started the game from the normal shortcut it would launch correctly into full screen.
We also had an issue where NASCAR Thunder 2004 would not launch at all with the profile created shortcut on the desktop.
We did try various other games and can report success with FarCry, City of Heroes, Painkiller, MS Flight Sim 2004, and MADDEN NFL 2004.
So the profiles are a great step forward for ATI, but there are still some bugs to work out before this can fully be taken advantage of.
Preferences:
With the preferences toolbar button you can manage the settings of the Control Center itself. You can choose to hide the tooltips, make sure the Control Center is always on top, enable or disable the system tray menu from here, restore factory defaults, show toolbar text, select the language, as well as select the skin you want to use. The CATALYST Control Center has skinning capability allowing pre-set skins or even user created skins.
These are the skins that are built into the Contrl Center, with CATALYST_Quicksilver as the default. We did notice that applying a skin does make the Control Center slightly sluggish. If you select the System Skin option the Control Center becomes snappier. My personal favorite skin is ATI_Crimson.
Help:
From the help menu you can select the help file which launches an HTML document in your web browser with easy to navigate help topics. You can also launch the Information Center, which will give you a technical view of your system configuration and video card and software versions. It goes as far as providing you the graphics card manufacturer, the core and memory clock speeds, and all of the driver software versions you need.