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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Ryan Smith - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link
With this article series, we're especially looking for feedback guys. We can't test every last game under the sun because of how long it would take, but if there's something you guys would like to see and a good reason for it, we'd like to hear about it for possible inclusion in a future regression.Questar - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
Feedback?Learn to proofread.
Cygni - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
Feedback?Dont be an asshole.
Scrogneugneu - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link
I would like to see that kind of test on another, more recent card.Why? Simply to test what the first driver revisions do in term of performance. The article already shows that later in the driver's life, there is little improvement made on performance... but that on early drivers, there is usually a good jump. Could it be possible to test with a newer card, with the drivers available at launch and up from there?
That way we could have a better idea of what to expect when we hear ATI or NVidia saying "we will optimise the drivers after the launch". Does every optimisation happens in the first release, the second, the five first... what release usually brings the best improvements, both on IQ and FPS?
Could be nice to see such an article :)
timmiser - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
I don't think that would work because the older drivers (ie-Cat 3.0, Cat 4.0) won't support the newer card.Scrogneugneu - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
Well, if you use the drivers available at the launch of the card up to the current release, I'm pretty sure they will all be compatible with the card, won't they? ;)The goal is not to see what improvements were made with Catalyst 3.0 to 5.12, but to see what improvements were made from the first driver available for the card to the latest. More importantly, to see WHEN were they made.
timmiser - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link
Well yes, you could do that, but then you have just a typical article about driver improvements over the last 5 or 6 months which every hardware site has done over and over again. What makes this article unique is they take an older video card and review older drivers so that we can see the driver improvement effect over the span of years instead of months.Scrogneugneu - Wednesday, December 14, 2005 - link
By more recent card, I didn't mean a ATI X1x00 card or a NVidia 7x00.I was more talking about something like the Xx00 series. These cards have seen a great number of driver release, and are still pretty recent.
Besides, this article showed us that the only improvements seen were generally at the early stage of the development of the drivers, or at that least later in the works, there's not much difference. So, we can assume that a year of different driver revisions would be enough to show us what kind of improvements are made.
timmiser - Wednesday, December 14, 2005 - link
Exactly, which is all information we didn't know until this article showed that.oopyseohs - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link
The Athlon64 you used was socket 754, not 757. =]