Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed

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:

• D3DAFTester
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
• Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne
• Halo
• 3dMark 2003

In order to minimize any potential bottlenecks outside of the video card, we did not equip the 9700 Pro on an equally dated system, and instead, put it on the fastest AGP hardware that we had. As such, the test was done on the following:

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.