Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed
by Ryan Smith on December 11, 2005 3:22 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
R300 & The Test
As the patriarch of nearly 3 years worth of technology from ATI, it's by no mistake that we start out with one of the most influential GPUs ever made. The R300 not only was the primary architecture of ATI's entire 9500-9800 line of video cards starting in later 2002, but was also the father of much of the design elements that we saw go in to ATI's R4xx GPUs, and only finally replaced with the R5xx series in the later part of 2005, a testament to the strong design of the R300.
Because of these reasons, not to mention the strong sales of both R3xx and R4xx based video cards, the R300 and its host video card, the Radeon 9700 Pro, are a prime example of what developments in device drivers can mean for a product. ATI has now had over 3 years to make the most of the software that drives the 9700 Pro, allowing us to see just how much more performance ATI could get out of the card with later drivers that was not obvious upon the card's launch.
To identify and analyze these improvements, we have taken a 9700 Pro and run it through a modified version of one of our earlier benchmark suites, testing a slew of games and benchmarks in a regression test against a dozen versions of ATI's drivers, taking a quarterly snapshot of performance and image quality. Unfortunately, in spite of the R300 hardware supporting Shader Model 2.0 from the start, ATI did not offer such support in their official drivers until some months after the card shipped, so for our testing purposes, we had to start with the first drivers that offered such support, Catalyst 3.0, which are a couple of versions newer than the first drivers for the 9700 Pro. Still, we will see even excluding the first few months of the 9700 Pro's life doesn't skip on the performance improvements that ATI's Catalyst team was able to work out.
The specific games/benchmarks tested were:
AMD Athlon 64 3400+(S754)
Abit KV8-MAX3 motherboard
2GB DDR400 RAM 2:2:2
120GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Hard Drive
Antec TruePower 430W Power Supply
All tests were done at 1280x1024 unless otherwise noted. To view larger images, please download them from here.
As the patriarch of nearly 3 years worth of technology from ATI, it's by no mistake that we start out with one of the most influential GPUs ever made. The R300 not only was the primary architecture of ATI's entire 9500-9800 line of video cards starting in later 2002, but was also the father of much of the design elements that we saw go in to ATI's R4xx GPUs, and only finally replaced with the R5xx series in the later part of 2005, a testament to the strong design of the R300.
Because of these reasons, not to mention the strong sales of both R3xx and R4xx based video cards, the R300 and its host video card, the Radeon 9700 Pro, are a prime example of what developments in device drivers can mean for a product. ATI has now had over 3 years to make the most of the software that drives the 9700 Pro, allowing us to see just how much more performance ATI could get out of the card with later drivers that was not obvious upon the card's launch.
To identify and analyze these improvements, we have taken a 9700 Pro and run it through a modified version of one of our earlier benchmark suites, testing a slew of games and benchmarks in a regression test against a dozen versions of ATI's drivers, taking a quarterly snapshot of performance and image quality. Unfortunately, in spite of the R300 hardware supporting Shader Model 2.0 from the start, ATI did not offer such support in their official drivers until some months after the card shipped, so for our testing purposes, we had to start with the first drivers that offered such support, Catalyst 3.0, which are a couple of versions newer than the first drivers for the 9700 Pro. Still, we will see even excluding the first few months of the 9700 Pro's life doesn't skip on the performance improvements that ATI's Catalyst team was able to work out.
The specific games/benchmarks tested were:
- D3DAFTester
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
- Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne
- Halo
- 3dMark 2003
AMD Athlon 64 3400+(S754)
Abit KV8-MAX3 motherboard
2GB DDR400 RAM 2:2:2
120GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Hard Drive
Antec TruePower 430W Power Supply
All tests were done at 1280x1024 unless otherwise noted. To view larger images, please download them from here.
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WileCoyote - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Easy, ATI was a Halo for PC launch partner. This was before the "Best Played with ATI" or "Insist on NVidia" days but ATI was the graphics card sponsor for the game. So they had a committment to Bungie/Microsoft.... not really to the customer. I'm not complaining because they're businesses and they want to make money. I just consider it cheating. Halo benchmark explained. Next?GameManK - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
well done, but it did feel like a bit of a waste of time readingsomething like farcry or half life 2 i think would be a more useful test
Googer - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Nice article, it must have taken a lot of time and effort to do this. Ryan how long did it take you to do all of these driver installs (then reboot) and benchmark them 72 Time?Thanks for the effort!
Googer - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Could you also test 3rd party drivers like Omega and others I have forgotten about? Then could you compaire them to Stock ATI drivers?nullpointerus - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Aren't the Omega drivers just a mix of different official ATI driver files?Humble Magii - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Seriously another craptastic article on drivers? Guys please sit down and think before you post an article and give it actual thought maybe ask some people around you god forbid.This site is sucking huge.
If you are going to do an article such as this use both competitors and go through each revision or at least a major revision to the drivers on each core and card.
Again stop posting worthless articles someone at Anandtech please take control and scrutinize what your people write and do before posting. Don't they have a set process there?
Cygni - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
"If you're disappointed with the free entertainment on this site, fine, write about it on your shitty Angelfire Dragonball Z site or send AIM messages to the other Korn fanclub members."Cygni - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
Ok, so what ive learned is you are reading a site that you think is "sucking huge", pretty making you a retard.Please sit down and think before you write such a fucking pointless post. God forbid there are people out there who are actually interested in video card driver performance.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to run through these tests? "Oh, just do both companys! And do all their cards! And do every CPU/motherboard/memory/timings setting too!... oh, and give it to me for free!"
What a joke dude. Go find your cave asshole, or go to some other hardware website.
VIAN - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link
Is this article that important? I didn't think there was enough content in the article to make it worth reading. Plus, the way you built it up in the introduction seemed to give less meaning to the article when we found that there wasn't that much of an increase in half the games you tested. It also seemed like most of the big performance boosting optimizations took place within the first few drivers for the R300. To prove your point, it might have been better to make a shorter article covering various games, but use only 2 drivers, the current and the earliest.And where's that long lost image quality article we were promised about a year ago?
Jedi2155 - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
But then, it wouldn't show the slight improvements of the driversets like the 3.00 tothe 3.04.