Introduction

In the last episode of the CATALYST driver saga, CATALYST 3.2 offered a wealth of bug fixes and resolved some lingering compatibility issues between the CATALYST driver and certain games. Unfortunately, one new bug was created in the process: accessing the console or pressing “Esc” to return to the main menu in Half-Life engine games caused the system to hang, requiring a complete reboot. While Half-Life’s popularity has certainly waned over the years, third-party mods based on it haven’t. To this day Counter-Strike is still the most popular game played online.

Fortunately we can report right away that this has been fixed in CATALYST 3.4.

Before the CATALYST 3.2 driver was even a day old, rumors of significant performance enhancements in the follow-up driver release were already running rampant. We’d seen the speed boost the CATALYST 3.0 drivers brought to RADEON 9500 owners, and CATALYST 3.1 to RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9700 PRO cards, so expectations were high for CATALYST 3.3.

As you can see however, the CATALYST 3.3 driver release was cancelled. Apparently the CATALYST driver team finished their 3.4 release earlier than expected, allowing them to skip over 3.3. At the time some were worried that they’d have to wait awhile to see the performance optimizations. Last week’s debut of CATALYST 3.4 in our GeForce FX 5900 and RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB articles proved that this wasn’t the case. But do the new drivers come with a performance boost? Yes! ATI has also added a few new additions to the CATALYST control panel.

CAT 3.2 color management menu

Old color adjustments

CAT 3.4 color menu

One of the biggest changes in CATALYST 3.4 is the enhanced color management system. Users can now define profiles for specific games and applications and can toggle between them with the use of hotkeys. This is a real handy feature for darker games. ATI has also added FULLSTREAM support to DivX player 2.1 and greater. Finally, ATI has designed a new user interface for REMOTE WONDER and Multimedia Center software dubbed EAZYLOOK.

As you can see, CAT 3.4 is much more robust

OpenGL menu

D3D menu

There were also some reports that AA quality has decreased in CATALYST 3.4, but we couldn’t see any differences:

CATALYST 3.2, 4xAA

CATALYST 3.4, 4xAA

Testing changes

On our end, we’ve made a few changes as well. We’ve added Splinter Cell to our suite of benchmarks tested, as well as the RADEON 9800 PRO (128MB) and RADEON 9600 PRO. This brings the grand total of cards tested to seven: the RADEON 9800 PRO, RADEON 9700 PRO, RADEON 9600 PRO, RADEON 9500 PRO, RADEON 9500, RADEON 9000 PRO, and RADEON 8500. This expanded set of tests should give you a good idea of how things stack up in ATI’s entire family of DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 products. Now on to the benchmarks!