Adapting to Parallelism: Catalyst 5.12 More Dual Core Friendly?

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.