Behind the Mask with Optimization and Catalyst AI
by Derek Wilson on September 26, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Anisotropic Filtering and The Test
To verify ATI's claim that full trilinear filtering was done on all texture stages while anisotropic filtering is enabled, we employed the D3D AF Tester. One of the fundamentals of Catalyst AI is that no benchmarks will be detected. So, we can be assured that the D3D AF Tester is not detected. Of course, their texture filtering optimizations may detect colored mip levels and change their behaviour. But even that is a valid optimization. There are fewer optimizations that you can make to trilinear filtering if the mip maps are not just scaled down versions of the original (which is certainly not the case here).
D3D AF Tester with Catalyst AI set to High.
Click to enlarge.
D3D AF Tester with Catalyst AI disabled.
Click to enlarge.
For all our performance tests, we used our AMD Athlon 64 FX 53 (overclocked to 2.6GHz) system. The graphics card that we employed was our ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition. We chose this card because performance enhancements such as these are generally amplified on higher performance hardware.
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861 - Tuesday, September 28, 2004 - link
a great tool!dvinnen - Tuesday, September 28, 2004 - link
That's good. Only difference I saw was a little lighting difference on the floor. Even then very slight. Good for an extra 10 frams.gordon151 - Monday, September 27, 2004 - link
They did make some general opengl improvements that helped the 8500 in doom3 and some other opengl games in recent drivers, but thats pretty much it for that class.ksherman - Sunday, September 26, 2004 - link
it too bad all the new driver enhanchments have abandoned the Radeon 8500... I could really use some of the improvements in games... :(KillaKilla - Sunday, September 26, 2004 - link
Here it is: its the third image down. Don't know if the whole .net framework could make this imposible, but I don't see how this could have affect...http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=1931...
KillaKilla - Sunday, September 26, 2004 - link
Would it be posible to implement the old, but very, very effective trick to see difference between AI settings? I'm talking about the thing where you hover your mouse over an image and it changes to the other image. I'll look for a link in a minute, if you don't see what I'm talking about.acemcmac - Sunday, September 26, 2004 - link
my question remains...... can I finally leave Cat 3.8 and MMC 8.7 if I want MMC and multimonitor support simultaneously???coldpower27 - Sunday, September 26, 2004 - link
I am glad ATI, is giving this suite allowing user to choose to use optimized drivers or not and having the ability to disable them as well. Good for ATI, now they are on par with Nvidia in this respect.