Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed
by Ryan Smith on December 11, 2005 3:22 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Conclusion
So, now that we have gone through 6 applications and 12 drivers, what have we learned? Not much, if we want to talk about consistency.
In general, there was one significant performance improvement across all games via the driver, and this was the move from the Catalyst 3.00 drivers to the 3.04 drivers. Otherwise, for anyone who would have been expecting multiple across - the-board improvements, this would be a disappointment.
Breaking down the changes by game, we see an interesting trend among what games had the greatest performance improvement. Jedi Academy, UT2004, and really every non-modern/next-gen game saw no significant performance improvements to which we can isolate to just the driver offering targeting optimizations, and there was only the one aforementioned general improvement. However, with our next-gen benchmarks, Halo and 3dMark, we saw a similar constant performance improvement among the two, unlike with the other games.
There is also a consistent performance improvement among most of the titles we used that was isolated to when we enabled AA/AF, which is a positive sign to see given just how important AA/AF has become. With the latest cards now capable of running practically everything at a high resolution with AA/AF, it looks like ATI made a good bet in deciding to put some of their time in these kinds of optimizations.
Getting back to the original question then, are drivers all they're cracked up to be? Yes and no. If the 9700 Pro is an accurate indicator, than other cards certainly have the possibility of seeing performance improvements due to drivers, but out of 3 years of drivers, we only saw one general performance improvement, so it seems unreasonable to expect that any given driver will offer a massive performance boost across the board, or even that most titles will be significantly faster in the future. However, if you're going to be playing next-generation games that will be pushing the latest features of your hardware to its limits, then it seems likely that you'll find higher performance as time goes on, but again, this will be mostly in small increments, and not a night-and-day difference among a related set of drivers.
As for the future, the Radeon 9700 Pro is by no means a crystal ball in to ATI's plans, but it does give us some places to look. We've already seen ATI squeeze out a general performance improvement for OpenGL titles for their new X1000-series, and it seems likely that their memory controller is still open enough that there could be one more of those improvements. Past that, it seems almost a given that we'll see future performance improvements on the most feature-intensive titles, likely no further game-specific changes on lighter games, and plenty of bug fixes along the way.
So, now that we have gone through 6 applications and 12 drivers, what have we learned? Not much, if we want to talk about consistency.
In general, there was one significant performance improvement across all games via the driver, and this was the move from the Catalyst 3.00 drivers to the 3.04 drivers. Otherwise, for anyone who would have been expecting multiple across - the-board improvements, this would be a disappointment.
Breaking down the changes by game, we see an interesting trend among what games had the greatest performance improvement. Jedi Academy, UT2004, and really every non-modern/next-gen game saw no significant performance improvements to which we can isolate to just the driver offering targeting optimizations, and there was only the one aforementioned general improvement. However, with our next-gen benchmarks, Halo and 3dMark, we saw a similar constant performance improvement among the two, unlike with the other games.
There is also a consistent performance improvement among most of the titles we used that was isolated to when we enabled AA/AF, which is a positive sign to see given just how important AA/AF has become. With the latest cards now capable of running practically everything at a high resolution with AA/AF, it looks like ATI made a good bet in deciding to put some of their time in these kinds of optimizations.
Getting back to the original question then, are drivers all they're cracked up to be? Yes and no. If the 9700 Pro is an accurate indicator, than other cards certainly have the possibility of seeing performance improvements due to drivers, but out of 3 years of drivers, we only saw one general performance improvement, so it seems unreasonable to expect that any given driver will offer a massive performance boost across the board, or even that most titles will be significantly faster in the future. However, if you're going to be playing next-generation games that will be pushing the latest features of your hardware to its limits, then it seems likely that you'll find higher performance as time goes on, but again, this will be mostly in small increments, and not a night-and-day difference among a related set of drivers.
As for the future, the Radeon 9700 Pro is by no means a crystal ball in to ATI's plans, but it does give us some places to look. We've already seen ATI squeeze out a general performance improvement for OpenGL titles for their new X1000-series, and it seems likely that their memory controller is still open enough that there could be one more of those improvements. Past that, it seems almost a given that we'll see future performance improvements on the most feature-intensive titles, likely no further game-specific changes on lighter games, and plenty of bug fixes along the way.
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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. =]