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CATALYST 3.7 Driver Report September 08, 2003 Brandon Bell |
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Summary: ATI's CATALYST driver team has been busy releasing newer drivers all summer long, CATALYST 3.7 is now the latest and greatest. These drivers come with enhanced compatibility, resolving issues in a wide range of games and applications. ATI also claims some performance enhancements with this new driver. We decided to put this driver update to the test in today's article. See how it performs with cards ranging from the RADEON 8500 all the way up to the RADEON 9800 PRO right here!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 10 ) |
It has been a few months since we last took a look at a CATALYST driver release, but ATI’s driver team has been hard at work nonetheless. After the release of CATALYST 3.4, which brought with it numerous performance increases for RADEON owners with DirectX 9 hardware and support of the larger frame buffer present in the RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB, the CATALYST driver team publicly committed to a monthly release schedule. This is the most aggressive timetable in the history of the graphics industry.
So far they’ve done a good job of holding up to their commitment, CATALYST 3.5 and 3.6 were both released in a timely manner. Neither release was a dramatic improvement over CATALYST 3.4 from a performance perspective: CATALYST 3.5 was slower in some cases than its predecessor but was highly stable. In a similar fashion CATALYST 3.6 offered no performance enhancements but was instead geared towards compatibility and squashing bugs.
With little changing in regards to performance, these releases may not generate much buzz in comparison to previous drivers, but they’re still important. Each driver update demonstrates ATI’s renewed commitment to driver development, an area it was historically weak in. We emphasize the word was because in some regards, ATI’s drivers are superior to NVIDIA’s.
Performance and compatibility
CATALYST 3.7 is first and foremost another release that is designed to address compatibility issues, but ATI has also added a new triple buffering option under the compatibility settings tab. ATI also claims a few performance enhancements for DirectX 9 users in titles such as Unreal Tournament 2003 and Dungeon Siege, while DX8 class cards see some modest gains in OpenGL games like Quake 3 and Serious Sam (among others). UT2003 is still a popular game, and its engine is used in a variety of games, so we were curious to see if these claims held true in our testing with custom demos in Unreal Tournament 2003 and Splinter Cell. You’ll have to read on for those results.
As far as compatibility is concerned, Flight Simulator 2004 owners will be disappointed to hear that the nagging issues ATI users have reported in numerous online forums with this title remain in CATALYST 3.7. Fortunately, nothing we witnessed could be classified as a showstopper, but the flashing menus were irritating to the eyes.
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles also doesn’t work properly with CATALYST 3.7, the 3.7 release notes mention problems with this title: “The Windows XP system not responding when attempting to launch IL2 Sturmovik Forgotten Battles if the display resolution is set to 1024x768 32bpp is now resolved. This issue was known to occur on the RADEON™ 9700, 9600, and 9500 series of cards.” Unfortunately, the issue we’ve encountered is somewhat different, the system responds just fine when we launch the game, but if we change the resolution to a higher setting than default (which is manually determined at install), the display is rendered incorrectly, IL-2 opens partially in a window. We’ve noticed this on all RADEON cards, not just the 9500, 9600, and 9700, and it’s a problem that first appeared in CATALYST 3.6.
Hopefully ATI can resolve these issues quickly, as these are currently the two hottest flight sims on the market.
SIDEBAR: ATI CATALYST Webpage
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 2 / 10 ) |
System Setup
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe
512MB OCZ EL PC3200 (DDR400) SDRAM
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO – 128MB
ATI RADEON 9700 PRO
ATI RADEON 9600 PRO
ATI RADEON 9500 PRO
Sapphire RADEON 9500
ATI RADEON 8500
Driver version CATALYST 3.6
Driver version CATALYST 3.7
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 9.0
Benchmarks
NASCAR Racing 2003 Season (Bristol custom demo)
Quake III: Arena version 1.32 (fscrusher demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003 (T2 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
SIDEBAR: We removed the RADEON 9000 PRO from testing to save time.
| NASCAR Racing 2003 Season | Page:: ( 3 / 10 ) |
Nascar 2003
Notes
Before you ask, yes, we made sure to disable vsync in our testing with NASCAR 2003. We’ve found that RADEON cards perform better in this game on the nForce2 platform than Intel’s 875P, this continues with CATALYST 3.7. Performance is unchanged with the new driver.
SIDEBAR: Check out the CATALYST 3.7 Release Notes
| IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles | Page:: ( 4 / 10 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB
Notes
Like NASCAR 2003, the performance numbers don’t change in Forgotten Battles with the new CATALYST 3.7 driver.
SIDEBAR: We recommend downloading the 24MB high-speed driver package, the 13MB control panel download reportedly didn’t include TRUFORM, SmartGART and other features normally present in ATI’s control panel.
| Quake III 4xAA 8xAF | Page:: ( 5 / 10 ) |
Quake III - OpenGL
Notes
As you can see, performance in Quake 3 remains unchanged on all cards in our testing, even on the RADEON 8500. Let’s take a look at another title that was reported to perform better with CATALYST 3.7.
SIDEBAR: Quake 3 is still the most popular benchmark people click to on this site.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 | Page:: ( 6 / 10 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 – Direct3D
Notes
At low resolution, we see gains of nearly 8% for RADEON 9800 PRO, and just a little bit more for RADEON 9700 PRO. Even RADEON 9500 owners get a small performance boost! As the screen resolution increases however the gains decrease until the cards are constrained by the hardware at 1600x1200.
SIDEBAR: The “T2” custom demo is recorded on the map DM-Insidious.
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 7 / 10 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
Notes
Although it’s based on a derivative of the UT2003 engine, we don’t see the tremendous gains for DX9 users in Splinter Cell. Performance is essentially the same as CATALYST 3.6.
SIDEBAR: Did you know that ATI sponsors a professional racing team?
| IL2:FB 4xAA | Page:: ( 8 / 10 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB
SIDEBAR: What’s up with the commercial break right in the middle of Sportcenter’s Top 10 plays last night?
| UT 2003 4xAA | Page:: ( 9 / 10 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003
Notes
Under the greater demands of 4xAA, the added performance CATALYST 3.7 brings is increased, up to 11% for the RADEON 9800 PRO. In fact, we see gains all the way up to 1600x1200.
SIDEBAR: Speaking of ESPN, they’re beginning to remind me of the downfall of MTV with all the reality TV shows and now a new drama show.
| Final Thoughts | Page:: ( 10 / 10 ) |
DirectX 8 card owners
It has been awhile since we’ve really been able to recommend a driver update for those of you with DX8 cards that are looking for more performance; ATI has wrought all they’re going to get out of your hardware. Therefore, don’t expect any significant developments anytime soon.
If your games and applications are running well with the display driver you’re currently using, there’s really no reason to upgrade to CATALYST 3.7. Performance is basically unchanged from CATALYST 3.6, which was the same as 3.5, 3.4, and so on. And upgrading your display driver can potentially compromise the reliability of your system and the applications you’re using.
DirectX 9 card owners
Likewise, little has changed from a performance perspective in most applications for DX9 owners. The one exception to this is Unreal Tournament 2003. We saw across the board performance improvements on all DX9 cards tested, and with AA enabled, at all resolutions. Unfortunately this didn’t transfer over to another game based on that engine, Splinter Cell, but hardcore UT fans should enjoy the added performance. And with the RADEON 9800 PRO running neck-and-neck with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra in UT 2003 with CATALYST 3.6, we believe the added performance present in CATALYST 3.7 should be enough for ATI to claim the performance crown in this application.
If this appeals to you, you won’t want to miss CATALYST 3.7. ATI also addressed a number of issues with this driver release, but like the DX8 owners, if you’re satisfied with the stability of your current setup, you may want to hold off on CATALYST 3.7.
The CATALYST team has suggested that it’s upcoming CATALYST 3.8 release will be “the most innovative and significant CATALYST release ever”, so this driver could be one to watch. They’ve delivered on all of their promises so far, so we’ll take them at their word on this one!
SIDEBAR: Whave you tried CATALYST 3.7 yet? If so, what did you think about them? Share your experience with others in the news comments!