CATALYST 5.6 Driver Report June 09, 2005 Brandon Sandman Bell

Introduction

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The most significant of ATI’s recent releases was easily CATALYST CONTROL CENTER (CCC), which was unleashed with CATALYST 4.8 just days before CAT 4.9 was unveiled. CATALYST CONTROL CENTER brought with it a host of new features, including a new game profile manager, enhanced hotkeys support, and revised menus for video control, VPU Recover, OVERDRIVE, and a new “3D” tab that combined the OpenGL and Direct3D tabs into one, with a 3D Preview feature that showed the benefits of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in real-time. CCC was a pretty groundbreaking release for ATI, but its sluggish performance turned off many ATI users. Quite a few went back to ATI’s older, less feature-rich control panel instead.

Over time ATI has worked hard at addressing consumer complaints with CCC. The driver download itself with CCC has come down in size, while performance, specifically CCC load times have been slowly improved. ATI has also provided new features unique to CCC, these include CATALYST AI (which was launched with CATALYST 4.10), and enhanced OVERDRIVE support for high-end RADEON cards.

CATALYST AI provides performance optimizations for quite a few of today’s latest and most popular games, including DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2, automatically detecting the game you’re playing and loading the appropriate optimizations. This could include texture optimizations, or simpler things, such as disabling AA in the original Splinter Cell, which doesn’t support the feature. Previously turning on AA in Splinter Cell would cause texture corruption which some users incorrectly blamed was caused by the graphics card/driver. OVERDRIVE 3 and OVERDRIVE 4 have also been introduced with CCC, which provides manual clock speed adjustment for the graphics core and memory, better hardware monitoring, as well as automatic clock speed adjustment. OVERDRIVE 4 introduced a 3D Test feature, allowing users to test out their overclocked settings.

But overclocking and performance improvements aren’t the only aspects ATI has addressed with recent CATALYST releases. ATI’s driver team has also made CCC easier to use, integrating the 3D portion of CCC into the system tray with CATALYST 5.2, providing more convenient access to frequently used 3D settings such as AA/AF adjustment. CATALYST 5.3 provided OpenGL 2.0 support.

Now ATI is set to release another CATALYST driver, and this one in some ways may be one of the biggest releases we’ve seen this year. Let’s go over what’s new with this driver.



SIDEBAR: ‘Quiver’ is the name given to a group of cobras.

CATALYST MOBILITY

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MOBILITY support

With laptops, driver support is solely up to the notebook manufacturer, not the graphics manufacturer. This means that your laptop manufacturer is directly responsible for providing drivers for you, whether it’s Dell, Sony, HP, etc. With vast libraries of drivers available, and a plethora of different products to support, notebook manufacturers are often overwhelmed by this burden, and as a result driver updates are rarely provided, and are often outdated in a matter of weeks. This is important, especially for gaming, as newer drivers will often resolve game compatibility issues that end user’s need in order to play their favorite games. In contrast, on the desktop, end users can download the graphics manufacturer’s reference driver, which is released more frequently and contains the latest features.

Starting with CATALYST 5.6, ATI MOBILITY users will finally have access to the same monthly driver updates that are found in desktop drivers, thanks to ATI’s new CATALYST MOBILITY driver.

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CATALYST 5.6 Overview

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Performance enhancements

ATI responded by improving general CCC performance in follow-up releases and by integrating CCC’s 3D functionality into the system tray. Integrating the 3D settings into the system tray improved the situation a little, but even this implementation was a bit on the slow side in terms of performance.

ATI has improved CCC’s performance pretty dramatically in CATALYST 5.6. ATI claims CCC start-up times have improved from 5.13 seconds to just 1.05 from CCC release 5.4 to the latest 5.6 CCC release with a RADEON 9800. While we couldn’t replicate a 1.05 second start-up time on our Athlon 64 4000+ system, we definitely witnessed a dramatic performance improvement, with CCC usually loading in about three seconds.

The performance of the system tray is also significantly improved, launching repeatedly took place in under one second for us, while our settings changes were applied nearly instantly. Navigation is also seamless, the lagginess witnessed before with previous CCC releases has all but disappeared. ATI has also added more display and TV options to the system tray, providing easier access to more settings.

These changes definitely make CCC more viable from an enthusiast standpoint.

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Test Systems

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System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 4000+

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe

1GB OCZ DDR400 SDRAM

ATI RADEON X700 PRO
ATI RADEON X850 XT PE
ATI RADEON X800 256MB
ATI RADEON X800 XL 256MB
Driver version CATALYST 5.5
Driver version CATALYST 5.6

250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache

Windows XP Professional SP1

DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

Pacific Fighters (kamikaze demo)
Far Cry 1.3
DOOM 3 (gameplay custom demo)
Half-Life 2 (turrent demo)
Splinter Cell




SIDEBAR: There are only two common English words that end with “-gry”, can you name them both?

Splinter Cell

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Splinter Cell – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: In the adult human body, there are 46 miles of nerves.

Pacific Fighters

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Pacific Fighters - OpenGL

SIDEBAR: The expression “mind your P’s and Q’s” stem from English pubs where the bartender would tell unruly customers to settle down. The P and Q stand for pints and quarts.

Far Cry Volcano

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Far Cry – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: Albatross sleep while in mid-flight.

Far Cry Training

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Far Cry – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: China has more English speakers than the United States.

DOOM 3 High Quality

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DOOM 3 – OpenGL

SIDEBAR: The cheetah is the only cat that physically cannot retract its claws.

Half-Life 2

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Half-Life 2 – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: Chewing gum while cutting onions will prevent crying

Conclusion

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ATI’s latest CATALYST driver is in our opinion, the best release we’ve seen so far this year, specifically if you’re using CATALYST CONTROL CENTER. Previously, CCC’s performance was atrocious, loading it up took forever, and then once it loaded navigation was a huge pain. The sliders were sluggish and laggy, and adjusting settings took forever. With CATALYST 5.6 however, most of the performance issues have been rectified.

This feature alone makes CATALYST 5.6 worthy of downloading, at least if you’re currently running CATALYST 5.4 (or an older release) with CCC installed.

The other additions ATI has made are also good to see. The system tray options are now more powerful, while video buffs are those dabbling into video editing will want to check out the new functionality ATI has integrated into CATALYST 5.6.

Gamers looking for performance improvements are likely disappointed by our results with the RADEON X700 PRO, X800, X800 XL, and X850 XT PE, but due to time constraints we only tested with a small sliver of games. ATI for instance has claimed some pretty substantial performance improvements in Lock On: Modern Air Combat thanks to texture compression, which is enabled by CATALYST AI on cloud textures with, according to ATI “no visual impact”. ATI also claims Chronicles of Riddick performance is improved slightly due to more efficient storage of vertex data. Of course, they also claimed performance improvements in DOOM 3 with CAT 5.6, which we clearly didn’t see today in our testing.

Another key feature ATI will be touting with CAT 5.6 is stability. ATI recently submitted their driver to an independent, outside testing firm, AppLabs. In their testing, AppLabs found that ATI’s CATALYST 5.6 driver was up to 8.6% more stable than NVIDIA’s 71.89 driver in some tests. According to Applabs: “AppLabs used publicly available test applications extracted from Microsoft's latest Windows Hardware Quality Lab test suite 5.3 to conduct the study in its Lindon, Utah facility. Testing was conducted on a variety of graphics adaptors from each of the two manufacturers, and included the repeated execution of a multitude of test cases (for more than 500 times on each card) to mimic a typical, long term, real-world PC usability scenario.”

The future for CATALYST looks pretty bright as well. In CAT 5.7, HyperMemory performance will improve, while CCC will be ported over to Windows XP x64. CAT 5.8 will include a task-oriented wizard that integrates all CCC functionality from within the new wizard. Users can select from a list of tasks and will get help for that task, say for example changing screen resolution. This should make customization and tweaking easier for inexperienced users. New Windows Media Center extensions introduced in CAT 5.7 will make it easier for users to hook their TV up to their PC, with scaling controls built-in, allowing you to customize your desktop manually so it fits on your screen. DVI HDTVs will also be supported in CATALYST 5.8.

The biggest news of today’s release though is probably CATALYST MOBILITY. ATI is the first graphics manufacturer to provide direct downloads for mobile users looking to take advantage of the latest driver updates. This allows MOBILITY RADEON users to take advantage of all the game fixes, performance improvements, and new features ATI integrates into each CATALYST release each month. Hopefully all notebook manufacturers will get onboard with this initiative ATI has started.

The future certainly looks bright for ATI’s driver team, with CCC performance dramatically improved, the new panel has actually become a viable option for many who were turned off by last year’s initial release. While performance still isn’t perfect, it is definitely better and you should give it a try if you were disappointed with CCC’s performance but liked its features. With CrossFire support on tap as well, things are definitely looking up for ATI!
SIDEBAR: It takes 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's supply of footballs.