CATALYST driver/OVERDRIVE

CATALYST AI

One new feature ATI has integrated into their display driver is known as CATALYST A.I. CATALYST A.I. is designed to improve your graphics card’s performance without degrading image quality. ATI uses a combination of technologies to accomplish this, with the implementation varying depending on the particular title.

So far, CATALYST A.I. is designed for five games: Splinter Cell, Unreal Tournament 2003/2004, DOOM 3, Race Driver, Price of Persia, Crazy Taxi 3, and Half-Life 2. If one of these applications is detected, CATALYST A.I. kicks into action.

In the case of Unreal Tournament, up to now trilinear filtering was only in use in the first texture stage, all other stages got bilinear filtering. With CATALYST A.I. you can now run trilinear filtering on all texture stages.

X700 XT 4xAA/8xAF AI off

Same settings, AI set to low

AI at high

In the case of DOOM 3, shader replacement is used to enhance performance. ATI replaced the lookup table for one lighting shader that was used extensively in DOOM 3. According to ATI the new table is mathematically precise, no banding or other artifacts should be introduced by the change, but performance improves by up to 20% on some cards, with the performance improvement varying based on the card.

DOOM 3 4xAA/8xAF AI disabled

AI low

CATALYST AI set to high

A.I. serves a much simpler purpose in Splinter Cell. Ever since the game was released, it has lacked support for AA: turning AA on in Splinter Cell with ATI cards results in visual corruption, while NVIDIA cards “appear” to run fine. NVIDIA got around this by simply auto-detecting for Splinter Cell. If SC was launched with AA enabled in the control panel, the driver automatically disabled AA. With CATALYST A.I., ATI does the same thing, if Splinter Cell is running with AA enabled in the control panel, A.I. turns it off. Finally, for Half-Life 2 engine games, texture caching is used to improve performance.

We only received the A.I.-enabled driver over the weekend, so we haven’t had much time to play around with it, but we didn’t notice any artifacts with it enabled. On low-end systems it’s possible that the algorithms found in CATALYST A.I. could put too much of a strain on your CPU, so ATI provides two settings “Low” and “High”. By default, A.I. is set to the “Low” setting, the “High” setting is more aggressive and is designed to improve performance even further.

We stuck with the default setting of low for all of our benchmarks, except in the case of DOOM 3, HL2 VST and CS: Source, where we provided results with all three settings with X700 XT.

CATALYST AI in the Control Center

Also, in case you were wondering, CATALYST A.I. is only available with CATALYST Control Center. ATI has no plans to integrate it into the regular control panel, so if you want to run with A.I., you’ll have to use CCC.

OVERDRIVE plans

ATI continues to offer OVERDRIVE to those who would like to use it. In case you’re not familiar with OVERDRIVE, it’s a hardware monitoring/overclocking utility that’s built into the control panel, providing dynamic temperature-based overclocking when enabled. While ATI’s plans aren’t written in stone just yet for OVERDRIVE with X700 XT, ATI expects to provide two settings above the default level of 475MHz; overclocking will occur in 7MHz increments.

This means OVERDRIVE support will top out at 489MHz, with the intermediate setting at 482MHz. The X700 XT’s memory on the other hand maxes out at 550MHz (we never saw a middle setting). The only aspect that hasn’t been finalized is the temperature thresholds. In our testing with OVERDRIVE enabled, our X700 XT card remained at the intermediate core setting, with the memory clocked at 550MHz, our core temperature at that setting was measured by OVERDRIVE to be 42 degrees Celsius.

Our testing

We’ve provided benchmark results for up to eight cards, ranging from the mainstream RADEON X600 PRO all the way up to the GeForce 6800. Those of you with RADEON 9600 PROs should look at the X600 PRO results, as your card shares the same clocks, while RADEON 9500 PRO/RADEON 9600 XT users should follow the X600 XT results. Your card mirrors its performance in many situations.