CATALYST 5.6 Overview

Performance enhancements

One of the chief criticisms ATI users have had with CATALYST CONTROL CENTER has been its sluggish performance. Starting up CCC itself often takes more than five seconds, even on the latest cutting-edge systems. In addition, adjusting the settings within CCC themselves isn’t instantaneous. Dragging the slider for AA for example from the 2x setting to 4x can take 3 seconds or more. For many enthusiasts, this kind of performance for what is essentially a driver control panel is flat-out unacceptable, especially if you like to tweak your settings a lot.

ATI responded by improving general CCC performance in follow-up releases and by integrating CCC’s 3D functionality into the system tray. Integrating the 3D settings into the system tray improved the situation a little, but even this implementation was a bit on the slow side in terms of performance.

ATI has improved CCC’s performance pretty dramatically in CATALYST 5.6. ATI claims CCC start-up times have improved from 5.13 seconds to just 1.05 from CCC release 5.4 to the latest 5.6 CCC release with a RADEON 9800. While we couldn’t replicate a 1.05 second start-up time on our Athlon 64 4000+ system, we definitely witnessed a dramatic performance improvement, with CCC usually loading in about three seconds.

The performance of the system tray is also significantly improved, launching repeatedly took place in under one second for us, while our settings changes were applied nearly instantly. Navigation is also seamless, the lagginess witnessed before with previous CCC releases has all but disappeared. ATI has also added more display and TV options to the system tray, providing easier access to more settings.

These changes definitely make CCC more viable from an enthusiast standpoint.

ATI has also improved the user interface with CAT 5.6. Visual clues help users understand the drag-and-drop functionality of several menus, while a new video preview mode includes a window showing users the benefits of that particular setting in real-time, just as ATI did with the 3D preview feature. For video playback CAT 5.6 users can easily enable full-screen playback on their secondary display, while a new video wizard helps users optimize their display configuration. Video enthusiasts can even choose which de-interlacing method they wish to use. ATI also claims improved performance in WMV9 videos, with CPU usage significantly reduced. CATALYST 5.6 is also the first driver to officially support Windows Media Center Edition 2005 for ALL-IN-WONDER users.


Finally, CATALYST 5.6 includes customizations. Rage3D for instance will be integrating Rage3D Tweak into CCC while add-in board partners are free to incorporate whatever features they wish into CCC. We’re already looking into releasing a FiringSquad Edition of CCC with support for RSS and other features.

But what about performance improvements in games? Let’s load up the benchmarks!