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Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed

 by Ryan Smith on December 11, 2005 3:22 PM EST
58 Comments | Add A Comment
58 Comments
Unreal Tournament 2004

As UT2003 and UT2004 are near-perfect substitutes for each other, we went with Epic's latest version of their best-selling multi-player FPS in order to put the 9700 Pro up against 2004's more refined engine. UT2004 is a good example of a near-modern game, utilizing some SM 1.x features, along with being the engine of choice for many more games, including America's Army. With the number of games built on the Unreal Engine 2.x, UT2004 represents an important engine to optimize for, given the era.

UT2004

UT2004 HQ

Here, we see almost no performance difference among the Catalyst drivers without AA/AF, with the performance actually dropping just a bit between the 3.00 drivers and later drivers. Enabling AA/AF, however, shows a more positive picture with a near-20% performance improvement between the 3.00 and 3.04 drivers, and a little more of a pickup after that.



Catalyst 5.11 versus 3.00 (mouse over to see 3.00)

Looking at the screenshots, you'd be hard pressed to find a difference in image quality between the 3.00 and 5.11 drivers, and it's the same story for all of the other Catalyst versions.

Other than improving AA/AF performance, it seems that ATI had little need to optimize for UT2004. Without a performance or IQ difference, there is little to say about the 9700 Pro with regards to UT2004.

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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 reading

    something 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.
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