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CATALYST 3.4 Driver Report May 18, 2003 Brandon Bell |
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Summary: If you recall our CATALYST 3.2 driver report, expectations were high for the performance improvements rumored to be present in ATI's next driver release. Today it's here, as ATI released its CATALYST 3.4 driver late last week. What's new with these drivers, and what kind of performance should you expect out of CATALYST 3.4? Find out in this article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 14 ) |
In the last episode of the CATALYST driver saga, CATALYST 3.2 offered a wealth of bug fixes and resolved some lingering compatibility issues between the CATALYST driver and certain games. Unfortunately, one new bug was created in the process: accessing the console or pressing “Esc” to return to the main menu in Half-Life engine games caused the system to hang, requiring a complete reboot. While Half-Life’s popularity has certainly waned over the years, third-party mods based on it haven’t. To this day Counter-Strike is still the most popular game played online.
Fortunately we can report right away that this has been fixed in CATALYST 3.4.
Before the CATALYST 3.2 driver was even a day old, rumors of significant performance enhancements in the follow-up driver release were already running rampant. We’d seen the speed boost the CATALYST 3.0 drivers brought to RADEON 9500 owners, and CATALYST 3.1 to RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9700 PRO cards, so expectations were high for CATALYST 3.3.
As you can see however, the CATALYST 3.3 driver release was cancelled. Apparently the CATALYST driver team finished their 3.4 release earlier than expected, allowing them to skip over 3.3. At the time some were worried that they’d have to wait awhile to see the performance optimizations. Last week’s debut of CATALYST 3.4 in our GeForce FX 5900 and RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB articles proved that this wasn’t the case. But do the new drivers come with a performance boost? Yes! ATI has also added a few new additions to the CATALYST control panel.
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One of the biggest changes in CATALYST 3.4 is the enhanced color management system. Users can now define profiles for specific games and applications and can toggle between them with the use of hotkeys. This is a real handy feature for darker games. ATI has also added FULLSTREAM support to DivX player 2.1 and greater. Finally, ATI has designed a new user interface for REMOTE WONDER and Multimedia Center software dubbed EAZYLOOK.
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There were also some reports that AA quality has decreased in CATALYST 3.4, but we couldn’t see any differences:
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Testing changes
On our end, we’ve made a few changes as well. We’ve added Splinter Cell to our suite of benchmarks tested, as well as the RADEON 9800 PRO (128MB) and RADEON 9600 PRO. This brings the grand total of cards tested to seven: the RADEON 9800 PRO, RADEON 9700 PRO, RADEON 9600 PRO, RADEON 9500 PRO, RADEON 9500, RADEON 9000 PRO, and RADEON 8500. This expanded set of tests should give you a good idea of how things stack up in ATI’s entire family of DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 products. Now on to the benchmarks!
SIDEBAR: CATALYST 3.4 release notes
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 2 / 14 ) |
System Setup
Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz
MSI 845PE Max2-FIR Motherboard (845PE)
256MB Mushkin PC3200 (operating at DDR333) SDRAM
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO
ATI RADEON 9700 PRO
ATI RADEON 9600 PRO
Sapphire ATLANTIS RADEON 9500
ATI RADEON 9500 PRO – 128MB
ATI RADEON 9000 PRO – 64MB
ATI RADEON 8500 – 64MB
Driver version Catalyst 3.2
Driver version Catalyst 3.4
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 9.0
Benchmarks
3DMark 03
Quake III: Arena version 1.17
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (Elephant Atrium demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003
Splinter Cell
Comanche 4
Jedi Knight II
SIDEBAR: Remember, if you do run into problems, submit a feedback form to the CATALYST team
| 3DMark03 | Page:: ( 3 / 14 ) |
3DMark03
Notes
CATALYST 3.2 delivered a performance boost in 3DMark 03 for RADEON 8500 and RADEON 9000 PRO owners, but that isn’t the case for CATALYST 3.4. We do however see enhanced performance for RADEON 9500 and up. The RADEON 9700 PRO sees the largest gains, 6% at 1024x768.
SIDEBAR: Futuremark recently released a patch for3DMark 03, now up to Build 320.
| 3DMark03 – Frame Rates | Page:: ( 4 / 14 ) |
3DMark03 – Wings of Fury
3DMark03 – Battle of Proxycon
3DMark03 – Troll’s Lair
3DMark03 – Mother Nature
Notes
As you can see, the bulk of the 3DMark 03 gains for RADEON 9800 PRO and RADEON 9700 PRO comes from game test four, mother nature. This is the most advanced test in 3DMark 03, utilizing 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders. RADEON 9800 PRO’s performance is enhanced by 8% while the RADEON 9700 PRO runs 12% faster thanks to CATALYST 3.4.
SIDEBAR: Hopefully Futuremark will release an update to its Video 2000 benchmark.
| Serious Sam 2 | Page:: ( 5 / 14 ) |
Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL
Notes
Performance in Serious Sam is roughly unchanged in Serious Sam 2 with CATALYST 3.4.
SIDEBAR: ATI actually issued a press release for CATALYST 3.4
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 6 / 14 ) |
Splinter Cell - DirectX
Notes
Like Serious Sam, the CATALYST 3.4 drivers don’t have an impact on Splinter Cell.
SIDEBAR: In order to run RADEON 9000 and RADEON 8500 benchmarks, we reduced the effects quality on all cards from very high to high.
| Quake III | Page:: ( 7 / 14 ) |
Quake III - High Quality
Notes
We see a slight performance gain for the RADEON 9500 in Quake 3 with CATALYST 3.4 at low resolutions, but the margin is incredibly slim, less than 1%.
SIDEBAR: Now that E3 is over, hopefully id will place some Doom3 content on its website.
| Comanche 4 | Page:: ( 8 / 14 ) |
Comanche 4 demo
Notes
In a bit of a surprise, the RADEON 9800 PRO’s performance slips by a few percentage points, while the RADEON 9700 PRO gets the performance it lost in CATALYST 3.2 back in 3.4. Overall the changes aren’t nearly as significant as the ones you’re about to see however.
SIDEBAR: Besides id, Valve Software also lacks content on its website for its next title: Half-Life 2.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 | Page:: ( 9 / 14 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 - flyby
Unreal Tournament 2003 - botmatch
Notes
UT performance improves by seven percent in flyby at 1024x768, although that’s the most significant gain that we saw. ATI claimed some pretty significant gains for the RADEON 9600 PRO, so we’ll be curious to see if they pan out in our testing with anti-aliasing enabled.
SIDEBAR: Remember, we don’t base any of our conclusions on botmatch results. We only include them because you’ve asked for them.
| Jedi Knight II | Page:: ( 10 / 14 ) |
Jedi Knight II – High Quality
Notes
We were pretty surprised by the RADEON 8500’s performance drop in Jedi Knight II at 800x600 and 1024x768, so we re-installed the OS and Jedi Knight II: same results (likewise for the performance increase at 1280x1024). Other than that, we don’t see any significant differences in this test.
SIDEBAR: This will probably be the last time we run tests with Jedi Knight II. This change should save us a little more time, allowing us to bring you the driver reports a little quicker.
| UT 4x AA/8x Aniso | Page:: ( 11 / 14 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby
Unreal Tournament 2003 Botmatch
Notes
We see performance gains across the board in UT 2003 once anisotropic filtering and 4x AA are enabled. Look at that RADEON 9700 PRO score at 800x600x32: a whopping 20% performance boost! The CATALYST 3.4 driver boosts RADEON 9600 PRO performance by roughly 8%, making these two cards the big winners in this test.
RADEON 9500 PRO sees a milder 3% gain.
SIDEBAR: If we get our hands on a 128MB RADEON 9200, we’ll phase the 64MB RADEON 9000 PRO out of our testing.
| 4x Anti-Aliasing | Page:: ( 12 / 14 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
Notes
We see performance enhancements in Quake 3 once anti-aliasing is enabled, once again all DX9 cards benefit from CATALYST 3.4. RADEON 9800 PRO and RADEON 9700 PRO performance increase varies from 4-5% depending on the particular resolution, while RADEON 9500 PRO gains are as large as 6%. Even the RADEON 9500 sees a performance increase of approximately 2%.
SIDEBAR: The CATALYST 3.4 drivers also add support for Windows XP Media Center Edition.
| 4x AA/8x Aniso | Page:: ( 13 / 14 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
Notes
The margins remain roughly the same with anisotropic filtering enabled, we also see that the performance hit isn’t very significant.
SIDEBAR: In case you were wondering, this driver is slightly different than the 3.4 driver we tested the 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO and other cards with last week.
| Final Thoughts | Page:: ( 14 / 14 ) |
DirectX 8 card owners
We haven’t seen any significant performance increases for you guys in quite awhile. Upgrade to CATALYST 3.4 if you’re experiencing problems with your current display driver and certain games, or if you like the new features that have been incorporated, but don’t expect a performance increase. CATALYST 2.5 was probably the last significant release for you; the CATALYST driver team has had a year to optimize the performance of your graphics card.
RADEON 9000 users in particular should probably avoid this release. According to the CATALYST release notes: “The monitor shuts down after booting to the Windows XP service pack 1 desktop with the RADEON™ 9000 Pro installed in the system. This issue will be resolved in a future CATALYST™ release”. We ran our RADEON 9000 PRO testing without SP1.
DirectX 9 card owners
Once again the CATALYST driver team has delivered solid performance gains for DirectX 9 card owners. We saw the most significant gains for RADEON 9700 PRO and RADEON 9600 PRO in particular, but to be honest, all DX9 card owners will benefit from CATALYST 3.4 once AA and anisotropic filtering are cranked up.
The issues with Half-Life have been addressed and it appears that this is the most widely compatible driver that has been released to date. Sure, there are still users that are reporting problems with CATALYST 3.4, but we have been unable to stump CATALYST 3.4 in our testing environment. The Rage3D forums have an official thread going for CATALYST 3.4 that we highly suggest you check out if you’re running into problems. The CATALYST team has been working very hard lately, this is the third driver release this year, so if you are running into issues, chances are a new driver will be available shortly that may address them.
We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again – the CATALYST driver team deserves a lot of credit for turning ATI’s software development around. The days of ATI software running best in D3D or in high resolution environments where memory bandwidth is the limiting factor and the application is often unplayable are long gone. Driver updates are frequent as well.
We highly recommend that you give the CATALYST 3.4 driver a try, the performance increase gives you a free performance boost, and compatibility appears to be good. If you do run into problems, you can always revert back to an older driver.
SIDEBAR: What kind of results have you experienced with CATALYST 3.4? Are you seeing similar performance gains, or are you running into all kinds of problems with this release. Share your results with others in the news comments!