Adapting to Parallelism: Catalyst 5.12 More Dual Core Friendly?
by Derek Wilson on December 4, 2005 10:45 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
For a quick overview:
* Day of Defeat showed that the new (non-public) beta 5.12 driver offers a small but consistent lead in each resolution and setting we tested.
* FarCry shows solid performance gains from dual core even without the driver enhancements (though the 5.12 driver does add a little performance of its own). At 16x12 w/ 4xAA the performance gain becomes negligible.
* Battlefield 2 shows none of the AA modes performing as well with 5.12 as with 5.11, and only the 800x600 mode shows a performance gain worth writing home about.
* Quake 4 shows no significant gains or losses due to the 5.12 driver or dual core.
The quick and dirty assumptions we can make are that Day of Defeat and FarCry have the most to gain from additional CPU performance here. It seems the way the new driver does AA is not as efficient in Battlefield 2. We will also venture a guess that ATI has not focused on optimizing their OpenGL support for dual core. Every other game showed some sign of significant improvement at 800x600, but Quake 4 didn't gain anything from the new driver. Of course, we will have to do more testing to really solidify our guess about OpenGL, and adding a few more games to our analysis will definitely be a good thing.
We are in the midst of testing the driver on older ATI hardware, midrange and low end parts, Intel dual core CPUs, and more. It's going to take us a little while to get this done, but hopefully this quick look is enough to tide everyone over and give us a good idea of what's going on.
Our conclusion after these brief tests is that the new driver is a good first step in the right direction, but that the benefit to end users is minimal at best at this stage. The real benefit will come in when game developers start working on parallelizing their code as much as possible. With FarCry we've seen that it can have an impact on performance, and, like we said, every little bit adds up.
For a quick overview:
* Day of Defeat showed that the new (non-public) beta 5.12 driver offers a small but consistent lead in each resolution and setting we tested.
* FarCry shows solid performance gains from dual core even without the driver enhancements (though the 5.12 driver does add a little performance of its own). At 16x12 w/ 4xAA the performance gain becomes negligible.
* Battlefield 2 shows none of the AA modes performing as well with 5.12 as with 5.11, and only the 800x600 mode shows a performance gain worth writing home about.
* Quake 4 shows no significant gains or losses due to the 5.12 driver or dual core.
The quick and dirty assumptions we can make are that Day of Defeat and FarCry have the most to gain from additional CPU performance here. It seems the way the new driver does AA is not as efficient in Battlefield 2. We will also venture a guess that ATI has not focused on optimizing their OpenGL support for dual core. Every other game showed some sign of significant improvement at 800x600, but Quake 4 didn't gain anything from the new driver. Of course, we will have to do more testing to really solidify our guess about OpenGL, and adding a few more games to our analysis will definitely be a good thing.
We are in the midst of testing the driver on older ATI hardware, midrange and low end parts, Intel dual core CPUs, and more. It's going to take us a little while to get this done, but hopefully this quick look is enough to tide everyone over and give us a good idea of what's going on.
Our conclusion after these brief tests is that the new driver is a good first step in the right direction, but that the benefit to end users is minimal at best at this stage. The real benefit will come in when game developers start working on parallelizing their code as much as possible. With FarCry we've seen that it can have an impact on performance, and, like we said, every little bit adds up.
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huges84 - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link
How much RAM did the test system have?Furen - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link
Since integrated graphics cards are the ones that (currently) lack things like vertex shaders, they probably will get a much more "dramatic" performance increase from dual-core drivers.Cybercat - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link
amazing improvements! At 800x600...Pannenkoek - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link
Indeed, I guess this article has only been posted because someone at Anandtech has worked on it, and didn't want to have wasted his time entirely for some beta drivers no one cares about.Cygni - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link
Ya, im sure all those people with Dual Core rigs, and all the people that will have Dual Core rigs by the end of this year (probably everybody on this board), doesnt care about Dual Core driver improvements.In other news, i hope that post was a joke...
Pannenkoek - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link
This is a _beta_ driver, not a released driver. Anandtech could have waited for the actual release. Now we won't be seeing any article on the real thing when it will come out is my guess.Yeah, I'm sure all those people with bleeding edge dual core processors and newest generation ATi cards will rejoice at their 5 extra frames per second at the lowest humanly tolarable screen resolution in this age.
Besides, it can only be pathetic if they actually get real performance improvements. On higher resolutions it would only show how lousy their drivers would be if they use that much CPU power to make an impact in benchmarks if the driver is off-loaded to another core. And on lower resolutions they apparently stall their rendering pipeline with current drivers. Thumbs up.
Andyvan - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link
Are you seriously saying that it would be better to not know this? I was also under the impression that they were going to post a followup with more tests.-- Andyvan
Pannenkoek - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link
I never said it would be better to not know this, whatever this may be. The article states explicitely that there'll be a follow up, I was a bit too cynic perhaps. ;-)The point is, there's a lot of fluff about some beta driver which "takes advantage of dual core". Earthshattering. It's the least any graphic card driver developer could do. And I welcome any comprehensive tests and article by Anandtech on real products. I just don't see any point in this article, especially not in the light of an upcoming "complete" article. (I see one: self-advertisement). Good effort by the Anandtech crowd, but it annoys me after all the other prerelease & beta & exclusive vapourware reviews.
Ryan Smith - Sunday, December 4, 2005 - link
Keep in mind that ATI's drivers seldom change once they hit beta. Once they're in beta, ATI is usually done with any coding and internal testing, and they're simply handing these drivers out to their partners for testing to see if in the unlikely event a problem crops up. So I certainly wouldn't consider these drivers vaporware, since they will be in everyones hands in another week or so.As for why we did this article instead of waiting for the complete article, we felt it was more important for you to be able to see what ATI's dual-core changes are capable of now on the best of hardware, rather than wait longer for a full-comparison article. With the need to swap CPUs on top of everything else, it's going to take us some time to finish the full article. We can certainly wait until we have every last benchmark done, but we'd rather show what we have now and get feedback from you guys, rather than keep you in the dark any longer.=)
bob661 - Monday, December 5, 2005 - link
Don't mind him Ryan. Some people won't shop for a Ferrari until they can afford one.