CATALYST 4.3 Driver Report March 17, 2004

Introduction

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While the public continues to speculate about ATI’s upcoming PCI Express and graphics plans, ATI’s CATALYST driver team has been busy cranking out new drivers. Each new release this year has added new features, whether its enhanced OVERDRIVE, newer MultiMedia Center software, or what was arguably CATALYST 4.2’s most popular feature, Direct3D setting enhancement, ATI’s most recent drivers have all contained something new to talk about.

CATALYST 4.3 is no exception, as ATI has incorporated SURROUNDVIEW in this driver set. SURROUNDVIEW is a feature that was introduced with ATI’s integrated RADEON 9100 IGP for the Pentium 4 platform. When a RADEON 9100 IGP-based motherboard is paired with a dual display card like the RADEON 9800, up to three displays can be used simultaneously by the end user. SURROUNDVIEW is supported by the entire RADEON 9x00 family (excluding the RADEON 9700 and RADEON 9100), giving end users with one of these graphics cards or motherboards, a tempting excuse to upgrade.

We recently got our hands on ASUS’ RADEON 9100 IGP board, the P4R800-V Deluxe and will have a full review shortly with our impressions of SURROUNDVIEW and gaming/productivity applications.

The other feature that has been incorporated into CATALYST 4.3 is enhanced rotation support. With a kick press of the rotation button your display can be rotated 90 degrees left or right, or rotated 180 degrees. Under the rotation tab you can also assign this function to a hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+Down is the default setting). This feature is handy for flat panel users.

CATALYST 4.3 is also the first driver ATI has released this year that purports to feature enhanced DX9 performance, so we were particularly eager to boot up Tomb Raider, while we also decided to add Halo to the test suite, even though it doesn’t offer the ability to record custom demos. But before we get into performance, we first had to test compatibility.

Driver compatibility/stability

Once again the first application we tested was EA’s Madden 2004. Anti-aliasing has been broken in this title for the past few CATALYST driver releases. Unfortunately, the jaggies persist with CATALYST 4.3. The best way to resolve this issue is to press Alt+Enter to switch to the Windows desktop, and then Alt+Enter to get back into Madden 2004. Voila! You’ve got AA in Madden 2004!

The other application we had issues with was Battlefield 1942. We noticed that the RADEON 8500 had severe problems with missing textures in our CATALYST 4.2 report, some end users had even reported AA issues with this card and previous CATALYST drivers.

Fortunately we didn’t run into either problem with CATALYST 4.3 and the RADEON 8500. The game ran flawlessly and looked beautiful.



SIDEBAR: You can download the CATALYST 4.3 driver for Windows XP here.

Test Systems

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System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 3400+

ASUS K8V 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 – 128MB

Driver version CATALYST 4.2
Driver version CATALYST 4.3

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional SP1

DirectX 9.0b

Benchmarks

Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
Call of Duty (demo0032 custom demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved
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: The drivers weigh in a 24MB.

Halo	Page:: ( 3 / 12 )

Halo – Direct3D

Notes

We saw across the board performance increases in Halo, especially for RADEON 9800 XT users who saw double-digit gains at all resolutions. The RADEON 9500 PRO also showed some impressive improvements, nearly matching the performance of RADEON 9700 PRO in some cases thanks to its eight-pixel pipeline architecture.

Clearly ATI’s claims of DX9 performance improvements are confirmed by Halo’s built-in benchmark (which is based on game cutscenes).




SIDEBAR: CATALYST 4.3 release notes

IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles

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IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL

Notes

IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles shows little improvements from CATALYST 4.3 across all cards. IL-2 (and flight sims in general) tend to stress overall system performance more than graphics, so it’s a little more important to have a balanced system if you tend to play these types of games. There’s hardly any difference in performance between the RADEON 9700 PRO and RADEON 9800 XT.



SIDEBAR: ATI also released new drivers for Linux.

Quake III 4xAA 8xAF

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Quake III - OpenGL

Notes

Like IL-2, we saw no performance change with the new driver in Quake 3. In fact it could be argued that performance slightly declined.




SIDEBAR: Well, T.O. finally got his wish, he’s an Eagle. McNabb, and Reid had better produce more than an NFC Championship berth now.

Unreal Tournament 2003 4xAA

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Unreal Tournament 2003 – Direct3D

Notes

After the performance gains we saw for DX8 cards like the RADEON 8500 and RADEON 9000 in UT 2003, we were hoping for more with CATALYST 4.3, but unfortunately performance is unchanged for all cards.



SIDEBAR: This will probably be one of the last times you see UT 2003 used as a benchmark.

Splinter Cell

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Splinter Cell – Direct3D

Notes

I personally can’t recall the last time tests were run with a CATALYST driver that showed any significant performance difference. It has certainly been a long time if ever. As a result, it wasn’t surprising to see no changes with CATALYST 4.3.



SIDEBAR: Pandora Tomorrow just went gold and should be on store shelves by this time next week!

Tomb Raider

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Tomb Raider – Direct3D

Notes

We see more performance gains in Eidos’ DX9 title, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. The margins aren’t as substantial, on average anywhere from 3-5% depending on the card and the resolution, but this figure is actually more in line with ATI’s claims from the release notes so we certainly can’t complain.

Another difference between Halo and Tomb Raider with CATALYST 4.3 is that all cards generally benefit equally. In Halo, we saw that the RADEON 9800 XT for the most part enjoyed the largest gains (although they were all substantial).




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

CoD 4xAA/8xAF

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Call of Duty

Notes

Call of Duty fans probably don’t like the RADEON 9800 XT’s numbers at lower resolutions, where we saw declines of 4%, but fortunately at the higher resolutions the performance decline disappears.


SIDEBAR: Call of Duty has been holding on strong to its #1 sales position. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up against UT 2004 and some of the other shooters that were just released recently.

Lock On: Modern Air Combat

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Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: One of the flyable aircraft in LOMAC is the F-15C Eagle.

UT 2003 4xAA/8xAF

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Unreal Tournament 2003

SIDEBAR: GDC is next week, ATI will likely be talking more about PCI Express there.

Conclusion

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DirectX 8 owners:

After the performance increases you guys got in Unreal Tournament 2003, you were probably hoping for more of the same with CATALYST 4.3. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any performance improvements with CAT 4.3, but the image quality issues we noted in Battlefield 1942 (one of the most popular games played online) are thankfully gone. Textures were all rendered properly and AA worked perfectly.

As we’ve said in the past, ATI’s driver team has had lots of time to refine and optimize their driver for your hardware, so the days of double digit performance increases are most likely gone. If they do occur, such as what happened with CATALYST 4.2, think of it like Christmas. But at this point you should really only expect nothing more than bug fixes and maybe the occasional new feature or two.

DirectX 9 owners:

ATI claimed to offer performance improvements in DX9 titles like Halo and Tomb Raider with CATALYST 4.3, and based on what we saw we can definitely corroborate this. In Halo, performance improvements of more than 10% weren’t uncommon across all DX9 cards, while Tomb Raider saw increases of around 3-5%.

Other than the added performance, CATALYST 4.3 also adds SURROUNDVIEW for those of you with RADEON 9100 IGP-based motherboards; flat panel users will also welcome the enhanced rotation modes.

As far as we can tell, the new driver doesn’t break anything, but at the same time they don’t appear to resolve any prominent outstanding issues either. Already many are complaining of a refresh rate bug on Rage3D’s forums, although we had no problems with refresh rates over here.

Based on all this, if you’ve got a DX9 RADEON card, you should seriously consider giving CATALYST 4.3 a serious look. In fact, we’d rate CATALYST 4.3 as ATI’s most exciting release of the year. The added DX9 performance comes just in time for new titles such as Far Cry, a game which can be very demanding on even the latest cutting edge system. This is arguably the best driver we’ve seen since CATALYST 3.10 last December.



SIDEBAR: Have you run into any problems with CATALYST 4.3 that we might have missed? What kind of performance improvements did you see in DX9 titles, or did you not see any at all? Voice your experiences with this new driver in the news comments!