The 3D Tab

The next new tab you’ll see is the “3D” tab. In previous CATALYST driver releases, there was an “OpenGL” tab and a “Direct 3D” tab. The functionality of these has essentially been placed under the “3D” tab, with a few added extras.

New 3D tab

SMARTSHADER Effects for each API

For starters, ATI has added the ability to apply pixel shader effects to OpenGL and Direct3D games, this is found under the SMARTSHADER Effects tab for the respective API. For instance, the black and white setting applies just that, black and white game play! There’s also an inverse color setting.

Normal Quake 3, SMARTSHADER Effects off

How about a little black and white Q3?

This is the inverse color effect

This is one of those cool toys to play with once and never touch again, although ATI is working on a way to expand it so that end users can add their own custom-made effects through this interface.

Now time for classic!

Sketch looks sketchy

Stylized color

The most interesting part of the new 3D tab are the predefined settings ATI has implemented. When you initially click on the 3D tab, you’ll see that ATI has predefined settings for functions such as texture quality, mipmap detail level, and eye candy features such as anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF). The default setting is “balanced”. This sets the texture quality and mipmap detail level to “high quality” (the same setting in previous CATALYST drivers) while AA and AF are determined by the application. You can then bump the main slider up to “high quality”, which will enable 2X AA and 8X AF, or for even better image quality, the “optimal quality” setting can be selected, which brings 4X AA and 16X AF.

You can customize your settings for each API

Here is custom D3D

OpenGL settings

These kinds of default settings are nothing new for enthusiasts, who have been manually specifying these functions in the control panel of the display driver for years, but it’s a step in the right direction for bringing eye candy features like AA and AF to the masses. The easier graphics manufacturers like ATI and NVIDIA make these functions available to consumers, the more rapid their adoption will be. After all, how many people that walk into their local Babbage’s or Electronics Boutique know anything about anti-aliasing, vsync, or anisotropic filtering?

Or go with defaults, here are Optimal Quality settings

Optimal Performance

And in case you were worried that ATI had dumbed-down these features for everything, don’t be. By clicking the “custom settings” button, you can go into more specific detail and manually set your AA and AF levels to your hearts content, as well as adjusting other features like you could in previous driver releases.