Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed

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.