CATALYST 3.2 Driver Report March 18, 2003 Brandon Bell

Introduction

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Life in the driver development department of ATI must be pretty hectic, as the CATALYST driver team has provided a plethora of driver updates since their initial inception nearly a year ago. As a result of their efforts ATI was first to market with DirectX 9 drivers, in fact the CATALYST 3.0 driver release was delivered the same day as Microsoft’s DirectX 9.0 API. We found these drivers brought tremendous performance gains to RADEON 9500 users, offering double the performance in some cases. The CATALYST team then followed the initial DX9 driver release with their 3.1 driver, which also came with some performance enhancements.

So when ATI announced the RADEON 9800, 9600, and 9200 family of graphics processors earlier this month, we half expected that the CATALYST team was hard at work on those products, then we got the surprising news of CATALYST 3.2, just a week after ATI’s Game Developer’s Conference launch event in San Jose. Could they have developed a new top to bottom driver solution that quickly?

It turns out that these drivers aren’t quite the drivers we were expecting (the 3.2 driver was submitted for WHQL certification back in February), but this driver does offer official support for the RADEON 9800 PRO. In a sign of the CATALYST team’s dedication however, hints have been dropped that the upcoming CATALYST 3.3 driver will offer substantial performance gains for existing RADEON 9700 users. We’ll just have to wait and see if those reports hold true, today we’re here to evaluate CATALYST 3.2.

Compatibility

One quick glance over the release notes and you’ll see the emphasis ATI has placed on resolving compatibility issues with this driver release. Thankfully we can report that the 3.2 driver is the most solid 3.x driver release we’ve come across. For instance, the stability issues we’ve had with the RADEON 8500 and RADEON 9000 in Jedi Knight II (while operating in high quality mode) are gone. We were able to run our complete suite of tests (and then some) with this combination without a single hitch. Something we haven’t been able to say since CATALYST 2.5 last year.

Also, the hanger quirks we encountered with the RADEON 9500 family and Comanche 4 in DX9 are gone and the CATALYST team has fixed the stuttering issues with onscreen text (Freelancer is a popular example), so we’re glad to see those bugs were squashed quickly.

Unfortunately however, one new issue that has cropped up is with Half-Life engine games and OpenGL. Dropping the console or pressing “Esc” to return to the main menu causes the system to hang, requiring a complete reboot. This also affects the mods such as Counter-Strike (the most popular game online), Team Fortress Classic, Natural Selection, and Day of Defeat (among others), so this is a pretty important issue that needs to be resolved quickly.

But what kind of performance enhancements should we expect from these new drivers? Lets dig through the benchmarks to find out!






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 9500 PRO – 128MB
ATI RADEON 9000 PRO – 64MB
ATI RADEON 8500 – 64MB
Driver version Catalyst 3.1
Driver version Catalyst 3.2

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1
DirectX 9.0

Benchmarks

3DMark 03
Quake III: Arena version 1.17
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (Elephant Atrium demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003
Comanche 4
Jedi Knight II



SIDEBAR: We’ll be including the RADEON 9800 PRO in our next CATALYST driver article.

DX 8.1 vs. DX9

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Unreal Tournament 2003

Notes

While we see some slight differences with the RADEON 9700, 9500, and 8500 at lower resolutions in flyby, for the most part performance is the same among these graphics cards regardless of the API. Therefore, if you feel uncomfortable upgrading to DirectX 9, feel free to stick with DX8 and reconsider the upgrade once DX9 content becomes available.



SIDEBAR: I’m still using the 3.0 drivers with the 9700 PRO on my personal setup.

3DMark03

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3DMark03

Notes

As ATI promised, CATALYST 3.2 offers performance increases for RADEON 8500 and RADEON 9000 users in 3DMark 03. At 800x600x32, we’re looking at a score that is 19% higher for the RADEON 9000, and 21% for the RADEON 8500! Meanwhile, performance is roughly the same for the RADEON 9500 and 9700 families. Lets take a closer look at the results.



SIDEBAR: Did you know that FutureMark was based in Finland?

3DMark03 – Frame Rates

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3DMark03 – Wings of Fury

3DMark03 – Battle of Proxycon

3DMark03 – Troll’s Lair

3DMark03 – Mother Nature

Notes

Not only do we get a performance boost for the DX8 tests 2 and 3 for RADEON 8500/9000 users, we also see that test 1’s (Wings of Fury) score is higher. Performance is relatively unchanged for the DX9 cards.




SIDEBAR: You can still download some of FutureMark’s older programs, such as 3DMark 99.

Serious Sam 2

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Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL

Notes

Serious Sam’s performance is roughly unchanged, there are some slight cases where performance increases, but the difference is well within the margin of error.



SIDEBAR: Serious Sam is bundled with lots of MSI video cards.

Quake III

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Quake III - High Quality

Notes

Like Serious Sam, we see some slight variances in performance, the 9500 PRO actually drops a few frames at lower resolutions, but the declines weren’t as severe as what we saw with CATALYST 3.1.


SIDEBAR: Does anyone else find it ironic that you can’t find any Doom III content on id’s website?

Comanche 4

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Comanche 4 demo

Notes

The RADEON 9700 PRO slips in Comanche 4, we see a 5% performance decline in lower resolutions. This is a bit of a surprise considering the CPU-limited nature of this benchmark, the other cards offer roughly the same performance regardless of driver.


SIDEBAR: Novalogic will soon be releasing Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, it would be nice to see this game ship with features for benchmark testing.

Unreal Tournament 2003

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Unreal Tournament 2003 - flyby

Unreal Tournament 2003 - botmatch

Notes

Our flyby test results are similar regardless of CATALYST driver used, but when bots are introduced we do see performance declines at 1280x1024. Looking back at our CATALYST 3.0 performance however, it looks like our CATALYST 3.1 results at that resolution were an anomaly, as the 3.2 performance is similar to what we saw with 3.0.



SIDEBAR: Epic recently released a bonus pack for UT2003 – sweet move guys!

Jedi Knight II

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Jedi Knight II – High Quality

SIDEBAR: Is anyone else getting tired of all the paper launches we’ve seen on the video side recently?

UT 4x AA/8x Aniso

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Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby

Unreal Tournament 2003 Botmatch

SIDEBAR: When we incorporate the RADEON 9200 into our testing we’ll phase out the RADEON 9000.

4x Anti-Aliasing

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Quake III – High Quality

SIDEBAR: ATI recently signed a Pentium-M bus license, that means we’ll see MOBILITY graphics for these processors soon.

8x Anisotropic filtering

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Quake III – High Quality

SIDEBAR: Speaking of which, it’s pretty cool to see DX9 hardware taking off so quickly.

4x AA/8x Aniso

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Quake III – High Quality

SIDEBAR: We loved the ALL-IN-WONDER 9700 PRO, can you imagine what a 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO ALL-IN-WONDER card would be like?

Final Thoughts

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DirectX 8 card owners

While we did see the performance improvements ATI has claimed in 3DMark 03, we’ve got to wonder if this is worth the risk of updating your display driver. If your games and other applications are running fine with the driver you’re using now, is it really worth the risk of upgrading to CATALYST 3.2 for the performance increase in a synthetic benchmark?

As you saw in our real world game testing, the CATALYST 3.2 driver offers nothing substantial over 3.1. Just as 3.1 offered nothing over 3.0 in our CATALYST 3.1 driver report, and 3.0 nothing over 2.5 (in the CATALYST 3.0 article). We hate to sound like a broken record, but little has changed from a performance standpoint for RADEON 8500/9000/9100 owners in CATALYST 3.2. Upgrade to these drivers if you’re running into issues with your existing display driver, not because you’re expecting a performance increase. The CATALYST team has probably wrought all the performance they’re going to get out of your hardware.

DirectX 9 card owners

For RADEON 9500/9700 users, it looks like the CATALYST 3.2 driver has been released solely for compatibility reasons. ATI has addressed the stuttering issues with Freelancer and Rallisport Challenge, and with 2D applications running in the background in general, but performance enhancements won’t be found here. If you’re looking for more performance, you’ll have to wait for CATALYST 3.3, whose release schedule has been accelerated to bring it to our PCs sooner. Perhaps even as an open beta!

Like the DX8 owners, we only recommend you upgrade if you’re running into compatibility issues with your existing driver, otherwise you should probably stick with what you’re using now. Counter-Strike fans in particular should consider staying away from this driver as well.

While CATALYST 3.2 does introduce a new bug, it’s great to see the CATALYST team address compatibility issues so quickly – CATALYST 3.2 comes less than a month after CATALYST 3.1! With such an impressive response time, we have little doubt that these guys are working hard on additional fixes, lets keep our fingers crossed that CATALYST 3.3 also brings enhanced performance!


SIDEBAR: What do you think of the CATALYST 3.2 drivers? Are you having problems with these drivers or is everything running great for you? Drop your thoughts in the news comments!