Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed

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.

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.