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Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed

 by Ryan Smith on December 11, 2005 3:22 PM EST
58 Comments | Add A Comment
58 Comments
Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne

Leaving the realm of FPS's for a bit, we take a look at Blizzard's massively popular RTS Warcraft 3, and its expansion pack, The Frozen Throne. As we have mentioned in the past, even for its superb image quality, WC3 is not a terribly performance-intensive game, so we aren't expecting any surprises here. Because WC3 does not have a benchmarking mode, all frame rates are approximate using a custom replay and FRAPS.

Warcraft 3

Warcraft 3 HQ

With only a marginal blip with the 3.04 drivers, you could practically set a watch to the 9700 Pro's performance on WC3 without AA/AF. Turning on these features causes a little more variance in results, but even here, there is ultimately no significant change in performance in the end. Though, we are curious about the overall lower frame rates compared to the high mark of 58.9fps with the 3.06 drivers.



Catalyst 5.11 versus 3.00 (mouse over to see 3.00)

Like with UT2004, there's not much of a story here with image quality. Although the nature of how we benchmarked and screenshot WC3 means that it's never exactly the same twice, there is no appreciable difference in IQ between the first and the last drivers, or anything in between.

Even more than with UT2004, Warcraft 3 is a no-story. ATI did not make any driver changes that significantly impacted either IQ or performance.

Unreal Tournament 2004 Halo
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  • Ryan Smith - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link

    With this article series, we're especially looking for feedback guys. We can't test every last game under the sun because of how long it would take, but if there's something you guys would like to see and a good reason for it, we'd like to hear about it for possible inclusion in a future regression.

  • Questar - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link

    Feedback?

    Learn to proofread.

  • Cygni - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link

    Feedback?

    Dont be an asshole.

  • Scrogneugneu - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link

    I would like to see that kind of test on another, more recent card.

    Why? Simply to test what the first driver revisions do in term of performance. The article already shows that later in the driver's life, there is little improvement made on performance... but that on early drivers, there is usually a good jump. Could it be possible to test with a newer card, with the drivers available at launch and up from there?

    That way we could have a better idea of what to expect when we hear ATI or NVidia saying "we will optimise the drivers after the launch". Does every optimisation happens in the first release, the second, the five first... what release usually brings the best improvements, both on IQ and FPS?


    Could be nice to see such an article :)

  • timmiser - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link

    I don't think that would work because the older drivers (ie-Cat 3.0, Cat 4.0) won't support the newer card.

  • Scrogneugneu - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link

    Well, if you use the drivers available at the launch of the card up to the current release, I'm pretty sure they will all be compatible with the card, won't they? ;)

    The goal is not to see what improvements were made with Catalyst 3.0 to 5.12, but to see what improvements were made from the first driver available for the card to the latest. More importantly, to see WHEN were they made.

  • timmiser - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link

    Well yes, you could do that, but then you have just a typical article about driver improvements over the last 5 or 6 months which every hardware site has done over and over again. What makes this article unique is they take an older video card and review older drivers so that we can see the driver improvement effect over the span of years instead of months.

  • Scrogneugneu - Wednesday, December 14, 2005 - link

    By more recent card, I didn't mean a ATI X1x00 card or a NVidia 7x00.

    I was more talking about something like the Xx00 series. These cards have seen a great number of driver release, and are still pretty recent.


    Besides, this article showed us that the only improvements seen were generally at the early stage of the development of the drivers, or at that least later in the works, there's not much difference. So, we can assume that a year of different driver revisions would be enough to show us what kind of improvements are made.

  • timmiser - Wednesday, December 14, 2005 - link

    Exactly, which is all information we didn't know until this article showed that.

  • oopyseohs - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link

    The Athlon64 you used was socket 754, not 757. =]
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