CATALYST 3.0 Driver Report December 23, 2002 Brandon Bell

Introduction

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On Friday, Microsoft released the long awaited follow-up to it DirectX 8.1 API, DirectX 9.0. Long awaited from ATI’s point of view at least, as their DirectX 9-based RADEON 9700 and RADEON 9500 family of video cards have beat Microsoft’s release by months (in the case of the RADEON 9700). In comparison, NVIDIA’s DirectX 9 part, GeForce FX, is still roughly a month away from public release, giving ATI a considerable time-to-market advantage over its competitor that it has certainly taken advantage of: the RADEON 9700 series has received numerous OEM design wins and reports persist that OEMs are gobbling up RADEON 9500 parts, resulting in limited supply at the retail level.

To coincide with Microsoft’s DirectX 9 release, ATI released its CATALYST 3.0 drivers, offering native support of the new API. The new drivers don’t introduce any new features over ATI’s CATALYST 2.5 driver, which brought with it the ability to enable or disable vertical sync (vsync) in Direct3D applications, a feature that has been requested for quite some time. However, to sweeten the package a bit, ATI has provided their RADEON 9700 launch demos from earlier this summer for direct download off their website. If the Natural Light 128-bit color demo drew your attention back in July, you’ll really be picking your jaw up off the floor after seeing it with your own eyes on your PC. You could possibly make a few bucks showing it off to your friends in the process.

In addition to the cool tech demos, ATI has also included a few screensavers on the same webpage. These aren’t your standard 2D screensavers though; these take advantage of the hardware pixel and vertex shaders present in your RADEON 9500/RADEON 9700 video card. In a somewhat surprising move, ATI has also included DirectX 9 drivers for all other owners of RADEON-based graphics cards. Unlike the RADEON 9500/9700 Series driver, this second driver is not WHQL certified, so consider it a beta release. This CATALYST 3.0 driver release is the second driver update this month, and the third release in the past 45 days. If there was ever any doubt in ATI’s commitment to driver support as of late, ATI has certainly been doing its best to squash those beliefs.

Teething problems

However, with any major driver release that is based on a brand new API, there are going to be problems. The Rage3D forums are already filled with users that have run into performance issues with the CATALYST 3.0 driver, we ran into stability issues with the uncertified driver and the RADEON 8500 and RADEON 9000 with Jedi Knight II.

If you recall the initial DirectX 8 release, numerous early adopters ran into problems and had lots of difficulty going back to DirectX 7. This is one of the reasons why the rollback feature of Windows XP was so quickly embraced by gamers. But if the new CATALYST 3.0 drivers bring a substantial performance improvement, that may be enough for some to justify the risk of installing them on their system. We put together this article to hopefully settle some of these concerns. Lets look at the results!





SIDEBAR: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Raven Shield is one game that offers higher order surface (TRUFORM) support.

Test Systems

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System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz

MSI 845PE Max2-FIR Motherboard (845PE)

256MB Mushkin PC3200 (operating at DDR333) SDRAM

ATI RADEON 9700 PRO
Sapphire ATLANTIS RADEON 9500 128MB
ATI RADEON 9000
ATI RADEON 9500 PRO
ATI RADEON 8500
Driver version Catalyst 2.5
Driver version Catalyst 3.0

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1
DirectX 9.0

Benchmarks

Quake III: Arena version 1.17
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (Elephant Atrium demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003
Comanche 4
Jedi Knight II



SIDEBAR: It looks like Jakub and I will be squaring off in the championship game of our fantasy football league. I don’t want to say anything more than that out of fear that it may jinx me, but I’ll talk plenty of trash once the season is over, win or lose.

Serious Sam 2

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Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL

Notes

Based on our Serious Sam results, the RADEON 9700 family doesn’t show any performance benefits with the new driver. The RADEON 9500 and RADEON 9500 PRO cards on the other hand, show some nice performance improvements. At 1600x1200, the RADEON 9500’s performance increased by 14%, while the RADEON 9500 PRO performed 5% faster.

The RADEON 8500 and RADEON 9000 performed roughly the same with the 3.0 drivers.



SIDEBAR: Speaking of the playoffs, the end of football season is always disappointing. Basketball is another great sport, but it just can’t quite compare.

Quake III

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Quake III - High Quality

Notes

Once again we see little improvement in the RADEON 9700 PRO’s performance, in fact at lower resolutions it’s slightly slower with the 3.0 drivers. But just like Serious Sam, we see a performance improvement for the entire RADEON 9500 family. The RADEON 9500 PRO performs nearly 2% faster, which isn’t a whole lot but it’s still a slight improvement. The RADEON 9500 shows a 9% performance gain.

As far as the RADEON 8500 and RADEON 9000 are concerned, the CATALYST 3.0 drivers still don’t offer a performance enhancement.


SIDEBAR: 2 days before Christmas and I still haven’t done any shopping!

Comanche 4

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Comanche 4 demo

Notes

Comanche 4 tends to focus more on CPU performance rather than graphics, so it was no surprise to us to see no improvement with the 3.0 drivers. Lets move on the Unreal Tournament 2003!


SIDEBAR: The real life RAH-66 Comanche is set to enter production in November 2004.

Unreal Tournament 2003

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Unreal Tournament 2003 - flyby

Unreal Tournament 2003 - botmatch

Notes

Of all the cards listed here, we see a slight improvement in Unreal Tournament 2003 performance with the RADEON 9500 PRO, the increase is just above two percentage points. The rest of the cards offer similar performance regardless of the driver used. We really don’t pay much attention to the botmatch scores, as like Comanche 4, they’re highly CPU dependant.



SIDEBAR: Tools used in creating UT 2003: Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and Painter 3D

Jedi Knight II

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Jedi Knight II – High Quality

Notes

Like the previous OpenGL games, we see a slight increase in performance with the RADEON 9500 line and Jedi Knight II, although the increase for the RADEON 9500 is a little tamer, 5% at 1600x1200. The RADEON 9500 PRO’s performance increases by roughly 2% at the same resolution.




SIDEBAR: Jedi Knight II was created by the folks at Raven, makers of the Soldier of Fortune series.

4x Anti-Aliasing

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Quake III – High Quality

Notes

Like us, you probably think the RADEON 9500 score in Quake 3 with 4x anti-aliasing enabled is a misprint or some type of mistake. So we formatted and reinstalled the test system with both the CATALYST 2.5 and CATALYST 3.0 drivers. Guess what folks, the numbers didn’t change – what you’re seeing is one massive performance improvement for RADEON 9500 owners. At 1600x1200 the CATALYST 3.0 drivers offer twice the performance of CATALYST 2.5!



SIDEBAR: Remember, the RADEON 8500 will be re-badged as the RADEON 9100 by ATI’s third-party board partners. Just pick up the RADEON 8500, it will probably cost less anyway!

8x Anisotropic filtering

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Quake III – High Quality

Notes

Once again we see a nice performance increase with the CATALYST 3.0/RADEON 9500 combination, at 1600x1200 performance is enhanced by 10%. At first glance it appears that the RADEON 9500 PRO also enjoys a performance improvement, but even in the best case scenario (1600x1200) the margin is barely over 1%, not really enough to write home about and pretty much hitting the margin of error.



SIDEBAR: Speaking of which, the whole naming scheme in graphics cards must be beginning to get confusing to the uninformed consumer. It all started with the GeForce4 MX and it doesn’t look like it will be changing anytime soon.

4x AA/8x Aniso

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Quake III – High Quality

Notes

Based on the 4x AA results, it’s no surprise to see the RADEON 9500 really taking advantage of the 3.0 CATALYST drivers with 4xAA and 8x anistropic filtering enabled. We’re once again seeing roughly a 2X performance improvement over the previous driver release. We also witnessed a nice 4-5% performance improvement for the RADEON 9500 PRO at the higher resolutions.






SIDEBAR: Did you know that ATI also produces 2D graphics devices for handhelds?

UT 4x AA/8x Aniso

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Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby

Unreal Tournament 2003 Botmatch

Notes

Unfortunately, there’s nothing to see here, performance from driver-to-driver is roughly the same across all the ATI cards we tested.





SIDEBAR: Digital Extremes was founded in 1994.

Final Thoughts

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For those of you with RADEON 9700 cards, based on our results it looks like you may want to hold off on upgrading to the CATALYST 3.0 drivers. We didn’t encounter any stability issues or the stuttering problems that have been reported by so many RADEON 9700 owners in forums, but we definitely didn’t see any performance improvements either. So you must ask yourself, are the fancy tech demos and screensavers worth the risk of comprising my system’s stability and/or performance by upgrading to DirectX 9 and ATI’s CATALYST 3.0 drivers. For some, the combination of two brand new untested variables will be too many, but we’re sure that there will be others who won’t hesitate to upgrade to the newer drivers (especially once you throw in those cool demos).

For RADEON 9500 PRO owners, the decision is a bit more complicated. We saw some slim performance improvements in the CATALYST 3.0 drivers, and again, no stability issues, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Keep in mind that we run all our tests on a system with a fresh operating system and driver install; in a matter of hours our hard drive will be formatted and wiped clean in preparation for the next article. We have no programs running in the background (a problem that appears to be afflicting some CATALYST 3.0 users), no sound card installed, and all of the animated windows and other flashy effects in Windows XP are disabled, all in an effort to isolate the particular component that we’re testing at that time (these are all variables that can skew test results, we try to minimize them as much as possible). How many of you can say that for your system? Once again you’ll have to weigh the pros and cons, the only difference between you and the RADEON 9700 owners is that you have slightly more pros than they do.

Based on the performance improvements we witnessed in OpenGL titles with the RADEON 9500 (non-PRO), we’d definitely recommend you pick up the CATALYST 3.0 drivers along with DirectX 9, especially if you enjoy turning on eye candy features such as anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering. It’s pretty hard to deny a double increase in performance that’s 100% free. If problems do crop up, consult the Rage3D forums for possible fixes and if nothing works, revert back to the CATALYST 2.5 drivers.

For all pre-DirectX 9 card owners, the CATALYST 3.0 drivers offer nothing for you. You don’t get to experience the DirectX 9 tech demos nor do you get the performance improvements of RADEON 9500 owners. ATI claims to see performance improvements in a few titles that we haven’t tested today, but based on the stability issues we encountered with Jedi Knight II (and a few isolated incidents of frame rate stuttering in the same game) we can’t recommend them. Lets face it, the big hoopla on Friday was all about DirectX 9 and your card just isn’t designed to take advantage of any of its features. There’s a reason why RADEON 9500/9700 owners get WHQL-certified 3.0 drivers and you don’t after all. Take that as a sign and wait until a game requires that you upgrade to DirectX 9 and/or DirectX 9.1 is released before you consider upgrading. Perhaps ATI has one more big performance jump for you up its sleeves but in all likelihood all future updates will probably be focused on squashing bugs.

Now that DirectX 9 is out and hardware that takes advantage of it is available, we’re eagerly awaiting the first generation of DX9 games. ATI and NVIDIA have both been working hard with game developers on their respective DX9 development tools (Rendermonkey and Cg) so we’re hoping the wait won’t be as long as it has been in the past, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Bring on the DX9 games!



SIDEBAR: Have you tried the CATALYST 3.0 drivers or do you plan on waiting for the guinea pigs to find all the problems? Voice your feelings in the news comments!