CATALYST 3.1 Driver Report February 17, 2003 Brandon Bell

Introduction

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We can debate the merits of 500MHz graphics cores or 256-bit memory interfaces and various memory types all day long, but having the most impressive hardware architecture means nothing if the underlying hardware is held back by inefficient or buggy video drivers. Just as the fastest sports car can be constrained by its tires, a poor set of drivers can make or break a graphics core release.

ATI’s very own RADEON 8500 is a perfect example. Early on, the card was inhibited by its drivers. NVIDIA’s GeForce3 and GeForce3 Ti 500 were outperforming it in benchmark after benchmark. When coupled with other driver quirks, the RADEON 8500 was initially, quite a disappointment. Today however, the situation is quite different, the RADEON 8500 outperforms both cards in practically all situations; anti-aliasing performance is the only area where RADEON 8500 falls short of the GeForce3 family.

Because of this, we’ve been covering driver releases for the past few years. We’ll admit that we were a bit slow at keeping up with ATI’s latest and greatest software releases, but we’ve really liked what we’ve been seeing from the company lately. ATI has made a real commitment to their driver development team, driver releases are frequent and are focused on squashing bugs while at the same time improving performance. Gone are the days when Microsoft’s latest desktop OS was the only operating system with adequate support, and ATI’s unified driver architecture supports the entire RADEON family of products. In short, ATI’s CATALYST driver team has done a wonderful job of ensuring that ATI’s latest hardware lives up to its full potential. The criticisms of the past no longer apply.

In our last CATALYST article, we examined the performance of ATI’s 3.0 drivers and while we found great performance gains for RADEON 9500 (non-PRO) owners, results were pretty limited for everyone else. Today we’re taking a look at the CATALYST 3.1 drivers that were released last week, ATI has claimed improved performance for the RADEON 9700 family, so we’re taking a look at the RADEON 9700 PRO as well as a handful of other RADEON products to see if the claims hold true.

Besides performance and stability, another important factor in any new driver release is visual quality. Graphics card manufacturers have slipped in driver performance improvements at the cost visual quality in the past, so this is one facet that can’t be overlooked. Fortunately ATI hasn’t done anything like this with their latest driver release; image quality was consistent with what we’ve seen in the past from ATI hardware -- excellent. One little quirk that we did notice however was with the RADEON 9500/9500 PRO, Comanche 4, DirectX 9, and the CATALYST 3.1 drivers. Textures on certain aircraft hangers in the benchmark test were absent entirely. The end result was a bare white hanger reminiscent of a circa 1980’s flight sim! It goes without saying that this wasn’t pleasing to the eye at all. Once we ran the same configuration without DirectX 9 installed the problems went away, so hopefully this issue is isolated to DX9 and can be resolved quickly.

Lets get on to the performance improvements these new drivers bring!




SIDEBAR: CATALYST 3.1 release notes

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
ATI RADEON 9700
ATI RADEON 9500 PRO
ATI RADEON 9000 PRO
Driver version Catalyst 3.0
Driver version Catalyst 3.1

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: Catalyst: Something that causes an important event to happen; "the invasion acted as a catalyst to unite the country"

DX 8.1 vs. DX9

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Unreal Tournament 2003

Notes

While ATI’s CATALYST 3.1 instructions call for the installation of DirectX9, these drivers (and the CATALYST 3.0 drivers) work just fine under DirectX 8.1. As you can see in our test results, it appears that the new drivers initially perform better under DX8.1 in the flyby test, but as the resolution increases we see no performance difference (including botmatch). Therefore, if everything is running just fine for you under DX8, we see no real reason to upgrade to DX9 unless you really want to check out the technology demos and screensavers ATI has provided on its website.




SIDEBAR: Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Serious Sam 2

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Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL

Notes

At lower resolutions, we see a slight performance decrease universally among most of the RADEON cards with the CATALYST 3.1 drivers. For the most part the margin is slim and isn’t very significant since you won’t be playing Serious Sam at 800x600 on any of these cards, you’ll crank up the screen resolution on all of them to at least 1280x1024 for the increased visual quality. By the time you crank up the screen res, the performance margin between the CATALYST 3.0 and CATALYST 3.1 drivers is marginal.



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 a performance decline with the CATALYST 3.1 drivers, although this time it’s a bit more significant than what we saw with Serious Sam 2. Under the high resolutions we’re going to be gaming in, we see a performance decline that was a little significant in the case of the RADEON 8500, 9700 PRO, and 9500 PRO. When you’re already at 200 frames per second plus (in the case of the 9700 PRO) obviously you have some power to spare, but it’s obviously no fun to lose a few frames if you’re the RADEON 8500 user.


SIDEBAR: ATI released its first CATALYST driver on June 13th, 2002

Comanche 4

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Comanche 4 demo

Notes

Not only are we getting visual anomalies out of the 9500 cards in Comanche 4, we’re also getting reduced performance at lower resolutions. We’re still not seeing any major improvements with the 3.1 drivers, and to be honest we didn’t expect to see any gains out of Comanche 4. With their advanced flight models, flight simulations like Comanche 4 tend to hit the CPU much more than the first-person shooters we typically test with.


SIDEBAR: ATI had claimed a performance improvement between 6-24% in Comanche 4. Perhaps they were referring to AA scores?

Unreal Tournament 2003

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Unreal Tournament 2003 - flyby

Unreal Tournament 2003 - botmatch

Notes

The same trends pretty much continue in UT2003 with the CATALYST 3.1 drivers, we see a slight performance drain at lower resolutions, while at 1280x1024 and up the performance difference between the CATALYST 3.x drivers is marginal.


SIDEBAR: ATI also claims a performance boost of 10% in Max Payne.

Jedi Knight II

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Jedi Knight II – High Quality

Notes

The stability problems we noticed with the CATALYST 3.0 drivers and the RADEON 8500/9000 have only gotten worse with CATALYST 3.1. We couldn’t complete a single run with these cards at 1280x1024 and up without Jedi Knight II crashing at some point during the demo, hence the blank scores at those resolutions. We noticed the same thing also occurred under DirectX 8, so this problem is by no means caused by the presence of DX9.

Fortunately, unlike Quake 3 (which is the game engine JK2 is based on) we don’t see the performance declines at the higher resolutions with the CATALYST 3.1 drivers.





SIDEBAR: “Ancient weapons and hokey religions are no match for a good blaster at your side kid” – Han Solo

UT 4x AA/8x Aniso

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Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby

Unreal Tournament 2003 Botmatch

Notes

ATI’s claims of performance improvements with UT2003 definitely hold true with the CATALYST 3.1 drivers once anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are enabled. In all screen resolutions and among all graphics cards performance is improved in the flyby test, in some cases by nearly 20%! Even the botmatch results are higher with the CATALYST 3.1 drivers, although the gain isn’t nearly as dramatic.





SIDEBAR: Unreal 2 has gone gold, the early reviews have been somewhat mixed so far.

4x Anti-Aliasing

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Quake III – High Quality

Notes

Unfortunately, the same trends we noticed earlier with Quake 3 continue to hold true once anti-aliasing is enabled. Performance is actually slower, even at 1600x1200.



SIDEBAR: Lets face it the only game that’s going to replace Quake 3 from our suite of benchmarks is Doom3.

8x Anisotropic filtering

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Quake III – High Quality

Notes

It really looks like the new CATALYST drivers don’t like the Quake 3 engine in particular, as performance is worse across the board. Normally you’d expect the limitations of the memory subsystem to hold the graphics card back at a high resolution like 1600x1200, but as you can see in today’s numbers, the 3.1 drivers are also playing a role here.


SIDEBAR: Check out the new FS League

4x AA/8x Aniso

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Quake III – High Quality

SIDEBAR: Do you have a Mac and want to use it as a gaming platform? No problem, drop a 9700 PRO right in there!

Final Thoughts

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DirectX 8 card owners

For those of you with RADEON 8500 or RADEON 9000 cards, our comments from the CATALYST 3.0 driver report still stand: there’s nothing new here. Sure, we did see some performance improvements in UT2003 with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, but the improvements really weren’t enough to justify risking a driver upgrade.

As our results with Jedi Knight II show, by upgrading you run the risk of compromising your system’s stability and/or may run into one new bug or another. This is always a danger when you upgrade your drivers, but with CATALYST 3.1 offering nothing new for you why run the risk? ATI’s CATALYST 2.5 drivers offer good performance and are rock-solid, so unless you’re unsatisfied with your current performance we’re not sure if it’s worth the risk of upgrading. As we’ve said previously, ATI has had nearly a year to wring all the performance they can get out of the RADEON 8500 hardware, so you probably won’t be seeing anymore significant performance increases.

DirectX 9 card owners

After seeing our performance results with Unreal Tournament 2003 under AA, you guys that are heavy UT2003 players are probably in the process of downloading these drivers right now. Frankly, we can’t blame you; the results speak for themselves. Unlike the CATALYST 3.0 drivers, which mainly benefited the RADEON 9500 owners, the entire family of DirectX 9 cards sees a performance boost from CATALYST 3.1. Hopefully the same holds true for other games based on derivatives of this game engine.

We were a bit disappointed with our Quake 3 results, but fortunately this is an older title that isn’t played as often and more modern games based on that engine (Jedi Knight II) don’t appear to suffer from the same setbacks.

If you’re hesitant to make the leap to DirectX 9, feel confident in the fact that these new CATALYST drivers don’t require the newer API, regardless of what ATI says. In fact, we had a better experience with DirectX 8.1; the visual quirks we noticed in Comanche 4 weren’t present. The bottom line, we’re going to give a thumbs up to all consumers who own a RADEON 9500 card or better. If you do run into problems with one of your games or your system in general, you can always revert back to an older driver release. Fortunately ATI keeps several older drivers available for download on its website.

It really is great to see ATI making such a dedicated commitment to driver development. Historically this aspect has played second fiddle to hardware development, but now ATI is truly doing its best to ensure that both sides complement each other. The end result is a product that is faster, more reliable, and supported across a wide range of platforms. This is nothing but a win for the consumer.



SIDEBAR: Have you tried the new CATALYST 3.1 drivers and have some additional thoughts to share? Feel free to add observations in the news comments!