Looking Back Pt. 2: X800 & Catalyst Under The Knife

Conclusion

Having now taken a look at two different series of ATI video cards over their lifetimes, we can finally pinpoint some trends with regards to ATI’s drivers that weren’t so clear having seen just one card.

First and foremost, there’s really very little of a progressive performance increase in most games. On any given game, unless there’s something about the driver specifically for it, either a major performance improvement or a bug fix, there’s no reason to upgrade drivers as it’s not going to change anything. It may still be a good idea overall, since most gamers play more than 1 game at once, but on a per-game basis, there’s little reason to upgrade drivers.

Secondly, what performance boosts do come can almost be guaranteed to be in the form of significant one-time performance boosts. On comparing any two drivers, it may seem like performance has gone up or down depending on the natural variations in benchmarking, but only a single game on the R420, Half-Life 2, showed that this was a meaningful improvement instead of the aforementioned variation.

Thirdly, most significant performance improvements occur either early in the life of a card or early in the life of a game depending on which is newer. Although Far Cry is an example of this occurring a bit later in life, as was Halo on the 9700 Pro, these are the exceptions rather than the rule. For any new game that’s been out for more than a couple of months, don’t expect ATI to make any further significant performance changes.

Fourthly, and this isn’t something that we were originally looking at when we started this series, but after installing the Catalyst Control Center on our test bed for the R420, we’re growing increasingly worried about ATI’s direction with their driver control utilities. The Catalyst Control Center increased the booting time of our test bed by approximately 10 seconds using the informal “how long until the hard drive stops working” method. And now that ATI has discontinued their control panel, this is the only 1 st-party way of adjusting an ATI card. ATI seems to have learned little since it first launched the Catalyst Control Center over a year ago.

Lastly, ATI seems to have taken a keener interest in 3dMark lately than they did with the 9700 Pro and 3dMark 2003. For whatever reasons, their 3dMark 2005 has kept increasing while it hasn’t in games, once again providing a practical example of how synthetic benchmarks can be deceiving versus what happens to performance in real games.

So, getting back to the primary questions at hand, how will this translate in to what we can expect from ATI in the future with the R5xx series? Considering what we’ve seen with both the R300 and R420, there seems to be little reason at this moment to expect that ATI will deviate from what they’ve done on their last two generation products. This isn’t going to be a perfect prediction, especially since the R5xx architecture is both brand new this time around and further deviates from traditional GPU design with a heavy shift towards pixel shading, but all signs point to ATI continuing to follow the trends above.

But what about NVIDIA, you may ask? Look for the ForceWare drivers to go under the knife in the near future.