Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed
by Ryan Smith on December 11, 2005 3:22 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Halo
Halo represents both a curse and a blessing among possible titles to benchmark. As one of the first FPSs to make good use of SM 2.0 and a very popular title on both the PC and Xbox, it's an important title to use to see what ATI could do with the newest feature of the 9700 Pro; but at the same time, it was still a console port that was in many ways mediocre. While we would have liked to test Gearbox's "Custom Edition" that implements properly optimized shaders, the lack of single player support in that version has limited us to the less optimized original version of the game. The lack of AA support has also limited us to only benchmarking Halo without any advanced features turned on.
As all the other pre-3.09 shots are indistinguishable from our 3.09 shot, and all post-4.02 shots are just like our 4.02 shot, there appears to be no other IQ change other than the flashlight fix. Overall, Halo stands apart as a game that received a constant (if small) improvement in performance, and the second game to receive an IQ-related fix.
Halo represents both a curse and a blessing among possible titles to benchmark. As one of the first FPSs to make good use of SM 2.0 and a very popular title on both the PC and Xbox, it's an important title to use to see what ATI could do with the newest feature of the 9700 Pro; but at the same time, it was still a console port that was in many ways mediocre. While we would have liked to test Gearbox's "Custom Edition" that implements properly optimized shaders, the lack of single player support in that version has limited us to the less optimized original version of the game. The lack of AA support has also limited us to only benchmarking Halo without any advanced features turned on.
Catalyst 4.02 versus 3.09 (mouse over to see 3.09)
As all the other pre-3.09 shots are indistinguishable from our 3.09 shot, and all post-4.02 shots are just like our 4.02 shot, there appears to be no other IQ change other than the flashlight fix. Overall, Halo stands apart as a game that received a constant (if small) improvement in performance, and the second game to receive an IQ-related fix.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
58 Comments
View All Comments
WileCoyote - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Easy, ATI was a Halo for PC launch partner. This was before the "Best Played with ATI" or "Insist on NVidia" days but ATI was the graphics card sponsor for the game. So they had a committment to Bungie/Microsoft.... not really to the customer. I'm not complaining because they're businesses and they want to make money. I just consider it cheating. Halo benchmark explained. Next?GameManK - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
well done, but it did feel like a bit of a waste of time readingsomething like farcry or half life 2 i think would be a more useful test
Googer - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Nice article, it must have taken a lot of time and effort to do this. Ryan how long did it take you to do all of these driver installs (then reboot) and benchmark them 72 Time?Thanks for the effort!
Googer - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Could you also test 3rd party drivers like Omega and others I have forgotten about? Then could you compaire them to Stock ATI drivers?nullpointerus - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Aren't the Omega drivers just a mix of different official ATI driver files?Humble Magii - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Seriously another craptastic article on drivers? Guys please sit down and think before you post an article and give it actual thought maybe ask some people around you god forbid.This site is sucking huge.
If you are going to do an article such as this use both competitors and go through each revision or at least a major revision to the drivers on each core and card.
Again stop posting worthless articles someone at Anandtech please take control and scrutinize what your people write and do before posting. Don't they have a set process there?
Cygni - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
"If you're disappointed with the free entertainment on this site, fine, write about it on your shitty Angelfire Dragonball Z site or send AIM messages to the other Korn fanclub members."Cygni - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
Ok, so what ive learned is you are reading a site that you think is "sucking huge", pretty making you a retard.Please sit down and think before you write such a fucking pointless post. God forbid there are people out there who are actually interested in video card driver performance.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to run through these tests? "Oh, just do both companys! And do all their cards! And do every CPU/motherboard/memory/timings setting too!... oh, and give it to me for free!"
What a joke dude. Go find your cave asshole, or go to some other hardware website.
VIAN - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link
Is this article that important? I didn't think there was enough content in the article to make it worth reading. Plus, the way you built it up in the introduction seemed to give less meaning to the article when we found that there wasn't that much of an increase in half the games you tested. It also seemed like most of the big performance boosting optimizations took place within the first few drivers for the R300. To prove your point, it might have been better to make a shorter article covering various games, but use only 2 drivers, the current and the earliest.And where's that long lost image quality article we were promised about a year ago?
Jedi2155 - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
But then, it wouldn't show the slight improvements of the driversets like the 3.00 tothe 3.04.