New ATI Driver UI: The Catalyst Control Center
by Derek Wilson on September 2, 2004 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Introduction
For quite a while, NVIDIA has led ATI in driver user interface capabilities. The ForceWare driver series has supplied users with all kinds of options. NVIDIA owners have been able to have more control over the functionality of their cards than ATI owners through the ability to disable or enable advanced optimizations. ForceWare even allows users to associate certain settings with a particular game, allowing users to pick optimal settings once for each game.Today, ATI fights back against NVIDIA on the software front and provides an extensive, clean, and powerful user interface in their Catalyst Control Center. We will take a look at the features of the new interface and just what ATI has done differently this time around.
The fist thing that we will look at is the technology behind the new user interface from ATI. This time around, they decided to go with Microsoft's .NET as a backbone. The features that they include offer more control for the power user and greater accessibility for those who want to play computer games, but don't understand the difference between anisotropic filtering and a trout. Let's dive in and see what's under the hood of the Catalyst Control Center.
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MaxisOne - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link
Oh WE WILL get a clue... and get a Nividia 6800GT... under NO circumstances is MS.net going on my system.. When Longhorn comes out thats a diff story but right now theres a choice and i have a radeon 9800 pro right now ... but i wont hesitate to switch when its in my interest.mlittl3 - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link
Oh, no...ATI has updated their control panel and it requires a heftier download. I thought 100 years from now I will be able to download a 5 MB file size of catalyst driver 3.0 for my ATI Radeon XXX4008000+ XT Super Duper Platinum Edition with a 56k modem (extreme sarcasm).Give me a break people. 50% of internet users have broadband in this country which means a 50 MB download is like 20 seconds. Every company updates their drivers and control panel to something new and guess what, Longhorn will probably have .NET built in no matter how much you hate it. Get broadband, get a clue and stop complaining.
DEMO24 - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link
I havent figured out why the writer wants a XP skin so much. The one on the utility looks good and the XP ones are exactly beautiful. Not really sure how thats a disadvantage but alright.daniel1113 - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link
Just so you all know (including whoever wrote this review), the ATI skins can be disabled and the default system skin enabled.Ardan - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link
Oh man, this isn't required use is it?I'll have 1GB of RAM before I get the 9800 Pro that I want (from MSI, of course), but if this is something that they want people to use from now on, then i'm probably going to sit and wait for a 6800 later on instead.
starjax - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link
http://ati.com/support/drivers/winxp/radeonwdm-xp....the actuall downlaod of the catalyst 4.8 drivers with display driver, contral panel, catalyst control center, and capture wdm driver is only 41 megs. 26 megs with out ccc. the ccc download only is 19 megs.
Da3dalus - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link
How is the new profile management "simple and elegant"? It may be an improvement over the current control panels (almost non-existant) profile management, but it still appears overly complex and unintuitive.Is it even possible to use the profiles together with something like The All-Seeing Eye (my favourite server browser)?
The nVidia way of handling application-specific profiles just seems much easier and less of a hassle to use.
It's a nice initiative from ATI, the control panel does need updating, but the end result is disappointing :(
Jeff7181 - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link
By the way... it can be found in the same area you normally get drivers on ATI's site. It's not worth it though... especially if you're on 56k.kuljc - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link
Yeah so like #6 said... where and when can we get this? I tried looking at ati's site, but with my SUPER FAST 56k I gave up.Also didn't read anywhere or maybe just missed it, but would it be ok to run older cats w/ this? For those of us who have the standby screen problem.
Reflex - Thursday, September 2, 2004 - link
Many people do not seem to understand modern memory management. The amount of memory an application uses really dosen't matter much anymore unless it is truly obscene(Photoshop), what matters more is how that memory is managed. 60-70MB means nothing if that memory can be cleared at a whim for other applications, and it sounds like Ati has implemented it properly since they claim that it will.Run some benchmarks. It is unlikely that this application will slow down any other application on your system. If nothing else is slowed down by it, then what does it matter how much memory it takes up?