![[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.
The Graphics Settings:
Display Manager:
On the left side pane are all of the various graphic settings for your video card. Having already gone over the welcome screen, next down on the list is the Display Manager which allows you to configure and adjust your monitor settings quickly and all in one place. You can expand monitors if you have a multi-monitor setup, clone them, change resolution, refresh rate, color depth, and rotation. When in the standard view it's best to use the built-in Wizards to configure your display settings, but in the advanced views you can tweak the settings manually.
Now we come to the most important selection for gamers, the 3D menus. ATI has simplified the 3D settings by combining Direct3D and OpenGL so that you do not have to manipulate a menu for either API. When you set the 3D options they effect both Direct3D and OpenGL.
Standard 3D Settings:
When you click on the main 3D selection you will get a window that shows you a global 3D quality setting slider. What you also have probably picked up on by now is the race car driving down a road screen that you see. This is actually a real-time 3D rendered demo that is running inside the window. As you change quality settings such as Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering, this 3D demo is updated dynamically showing you what those features do. This is a great benefit for novices who do not exactly know what AA and AF do. By moving the slider and turning on various levels of AA and AF, a person can see exactly what it's doing so that they will know what to look for in games and how much of an image quality improvement they can expect. The global slider here on this main 3D window has pre-set selections for AA and AF settings as you move it from Optimal Performance to Optimal Quality. This slider is for novice users, and advanced users will want to manually tweak AA and AF separately themselves. Note that ATI does have plans for you to be able to customize this 3D demo on your own using the SDK.
If you click the plus box next to the 3D option on the left pane it will drop down all of the advanced 3D settings available on your video card.
AA and AF:
As you can see above, each quality setting also has the same 3D demo running so that moving the AA slider, for example, from Application Preference to 2XAA will show you exactly what the benefits are at 2XAA. Temporal Anti-Aliasing is built in for those cards that support this technology, read ATI’s Radeon DirectX 9 class video cards. With the Anisotropic quality option you can still select between performance and quality modes. Because the 3D demo automatically updates itself when you make changes there is a slight delay after you select an option.
Texture Details:
The Texture Preference and Mipmap Detail sliders are also still present and set at High Quality by default. The TRUFORM option is also still available but disabled by default. SMARTSHADER effects are also present.
No Preview:
The menu that most advanced users will be interested in is the No Preview menu. Here everything is grouped together in one window with no 3D preview. This is also where you will find the slider for VSYNC which its default setting is “Off, unless application specifies”.
API Specific:
There is also an API specific menu that lets you specify settings specific to Direct3D and OpenGL.
Color:
There is a basic color menu which allows you to change gamma, brightness, and contrast of the red, green, and blue channels for the desktop. If you click on the Set color correction for drop down menu, you will find another selection to adjust the colors for full screen 3D as well.
Video Settings:
The video configuration settings have been expanded and now offer up pre-defined profiles which can configure video settings. Under the Video Standard Settings are video presets you can select while a video is playing. There is a menu to change various overlay settings such as gamma, brightness, contrast, saturation, and hue. There is an advanced Theater Mode menu that lets you set overlay display clone options and theater mode options which let you set the video aspect ratio and aspect ratio of the display showing full screen video.
SMARTGART:
SMARTGART has been beefed up in the new Control Center and allows many more options. You can change the AGP speed as before, and you can enable or disable Fast Writes as before. The added options are to enable or disable AGP Write and AGP Read as well as PCI Write and PCI Read.
VPU Recover:
There is a brand new version of VPU Recover which is said to significantly increase the success rate of a full system recovery in the event of a graphics hang.
OVERDRIVE:
OVERDRIVE is here as well which will overclock your VPU and does have a new overdrive level for the graphics memory on cards that it is supported on. On our X800Pro we were not able to get it to overclock the memory, though it did overclock the core speed up to 506MHz which is a healthy overclock from 473MHz.