CATALYST 3.10 Driver Report January 13, 2004

Introduction

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As part of its recent commitment to release a new graphics driver every month, in mid-December ATI released its CATALYST 3.10 driver to the web. Initially, CATALYST 3.10 caused some confusion among FS readers in the news comments, as the name was similar to the CATALYST 3.1 driver released at the beginning of this year. Whereas CATALYST 3.1 is pronounced “three dot one”, CATALYST 3.10 is known as “three dot ten”.

Under ATI’s new naming scheme, the three denotes the year the driver was released (in this case, 2003), while the “.10” designates CATALYST 3.10 as the tenth driver released for that year. The CATALYST team will ring in 2004 with a new 4.x driver set sometime later this month.

Other than the new name, the biggest topic surrounding CATALYST 3.10 is game compatibility. If you recall, shortly after we posted our CATALYST 3.9 report, ATI issued a hotfix for its CATALYST driver to resolve the issues with Call of Duty. ATI cards were notorious for crashing with this game, which was the #2 selling game in November and December, behind The Sims: Makin’ Magic (an expansion pack that costs less than Call of Duty). In fact, Call of Duty has already surpassed Battlefield 1942 and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory as the #2 game played online so clearly this was an issue that needed to be addressed.

The hotfix ATI issued is essentially the beta version of CATALYST 3.10, so the driver we’re testing today was originally battle-tested by many of you back in November.

ATI has also squashed a few more bugs with the final release of CATALYST 3.10. For instance, the menu bug in Battlefield 1942 we mentioned in the CATALYST 3.9 report has been fixed. In addition, the CATALYST driver team has resolved the flickering textures issue with IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles.

This bug was particularly annoying, as it was present whenever you played IL-2. Considering that IL-2 is still considered the best WWII flight simulator on the market among flight simmers, it’s pretty important that ATI has addressed this. The most overwhelming complaint now revolves around EA’s Madden 2004 and anti-aliasing. With CATALYST 3.10, this feature doesn’t work.



SIDEBAR: CATALYST 3.10 release notes

Test Systems

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System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe

512MB OCZ EL PC3200 (DDR400) SDRAM

ATI RADEON 9800 XT – 256MB
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO – 128MB
ATI RADEON 9700 PRO
ATI RADEON 9600 PRO
ATI RADEON 9600 XT
ATI RADEON 9500 PRO
Sapphire RADEON 9500
ATI RADEON 8500
Driver version CATALYST 3.9
Driver version CATALYST 3.10

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 9.0b

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)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (paris demo)



SIDEBAR: You can download CATALYST 3.10 from ATI’s driver page

NASCAR Racing 2003 Season

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Nascar 2003 – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: ATI recently announced the FireGL X2-256t for the workstation market.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles

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IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL

SIDEBAR: Lock On benches coming later this week!

Quake III 4xAA 8xAF

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Quake III - OpenGL

SIDEBAR: ATI also announced a 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO Special Edition card for Mac.

Unreal Tournament 2003

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Unreal Tournament 2003 – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: CATALYST 3.10 weighs in at a hefty 22MB.

Splinter Cell

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Splinter Cell – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: Did you catch ATI’s IMAGEON demonstration with Climax of MotoGP 2?

Tomb Raider

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Tomb Raider – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: We enabled depth of field for Tomb Raider testing (V49).

UT 2003 4xAA

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Unreal Tournament 2003

SIDEBAR: Don’t forget to check out the new FS forums!

Final Thoughts

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All RADEON card owners

While those of you looking for performance improvements are likely disappointed with the release of CATALYST 3.10, we must say that the stability/compatibility improvements introduced with this release are definitely more welcome, and we have a strong feeling many of you would agree with this sentiment. There’s nothing more frustrating than executing a brilliant flanking maneuver in Call of Duty only to have the game crash and be forced to do it all over again. The game would literally crash at will with previous drivers unless fast writes was disabled.

With CATALYST 3.10, frequent crashes are a thing of the past.

Flight simmers will also appreciate that IL-2 works beautifully again. The display corruption in Battlefield: 1942 is also gone.

This means fewer support calls for the affected games, both to the publisher and ATI. Sure, you can’t put a specific dollar value on how important this is, nor can it be easily benchmarked, but those of you who actually own ATI hardware and have dealt with these issues know just how significant this is. ATI cards have offered blistering performance for well over 12 months now but this performance means nothing if you’re busy troubleshooting problems or rebooting all the time.

CATALYST 3.10 was a fitting way for ATI to end 2003. It merges all the performance improvements of CATALYST 3.7 (most notably in UT 2003) with the innovation and features of CATALYST 3.8, and, just as important, the stability and compatibility of CATALYST 3.5. ATI also recognized the immediacy of the Call of Duty issues and quickly issued a hotfix.

It’s this kind of service that proves ATI has come a long way in software support. And features like OVERDRIVE suggest that ATI’s CATALYST drivers are only going to be getting better in the near future.

Questions or comments on ATI’s latest driver release? Perhaps you have an ATI-related tech question you wish to ask? Head on over to the FS forums for answers.



SIDEBAR: What are your thoughts on CATALYST 3.10? Have you had good luck with this driver? Share your experience in the news comments!