So, checked your latest version of the ATI CATALYST drivers suite lately? Realizing my slacking off on the drivers updates, due to the fact the new drivers suite by ATI has been revamped, I now question whether or not the new drivers are better or worse than the old.

Normally the latest drivers, at first, are not always the best ones to get, especially in normal Counter-strike and some other games, however all the latest games that are coming out seem to need as much performance enchancing as you can possibly get. Following up on a news post from Sony Online Entertainment recently, recommending upgrading to DirectX 9.0C and the latest video drivers, I went to the ATI website and sure enough, there were new drivers (and I even missed an update!). ATI has rebuilt their suite, taking out the traditional control panels when you right-click and phasing in a new control set, called the Control Center. With this jazzy interface (even skinnable!) you get an actual rendering while you change your settings. Personally, I wanted the old interface back.

The new one, after the initial introduction, has basically phased out the old interface so you're stuck with the new interface. The good news? Since that's out of the way, they're actually starting to introduce new features in the drivers, trying some creative techniques to pump up performance. Like what? Well, everyone knows about the technology 3Dc that ATI has been working with...right? lol 3Dc is a method of compression that allows up to 4:1 - that's 4x the detail without increasing memory usage in textures and can also be used for normal maps...(too bad no games really use it!). Ahead of it's time, perhaps, but it doesn't help right now. Another new thing, called 'geometry instancing' which was heard about at SIGGRAPH 2004 (I think I reported on that, was very interesting this year), to allow a single piece of geometry to be replicated and reused (think tree leaves, trees, grass, etc.). The bad thing? The game has to be specifically coded to use it (FarCry uses it and HL2 as well, I believe). SM3-supported cards use instancing, but for ATI cards (since they don't have SM3 yet) have another way, but if used with a non-supported ATI card then the result are very ugly.

So we are left with CATALYST A.I....at this point, who cares! But wait...This is the most promising, because remember those nVidia "scandals" with driver optimizations? Well, well, who says they're cheating if they're going to help your performance! ATI is now having their turn at bat, this feature enables generic and application specific optimizations that can really tweak things for your game...or at least, in theory. Since you can enable or disable (and toggle the varying degrees of use), it's up to you if you feel you're "cheating" yourself by taking full-advantage of your computer's hardware. I won't let anything stand in the way of proper performance on my machine, no true gamer would and so the truth comes down to...does it work? Well, considering it's proven that ATI changes their OpenGL driver just about each month, no one knows. As far as D3D, it has code for improving Doom 3, UT2003 and UT2004, HL2 (and mods), etc. and that was in the first version of the CCC. By now, who knows what it includes...but in general it works through texture filtering and thusly, this affects all games. A good option, hopefully getting better as their goal is increased performance, without decreased visual quality.

ok im done ranting, yippie!

I forgot to put an ending to my book, so here it is.

Basically, I jumped into CATALYST Control Center 4.11 (that's right, four-point-eleven) and...holy crap! Don't use 4.11 for HL2, just...please.

4.12 (that's four-point-twelve for the math challenged, jk ATI) on the other hand, fixes most of the problems with HL2 that 4.11 put together, so once again...yay!

Conclusion? 4.12 is good, 4.11 is bad. Drivers are evil.

Great Job on the drivers editorial RedTiger.
Thanks

Thanks, I can't say it was a great work (hypercritical), since I wrote it mostly because I had no one to talk with about it...but figured it was kinda useful...and then of course, informative too...

It's very interesting that FarCry supports Shader Model 3 and Geometry Instancing, but no games are really using that...geometry instancing is supposedly going to be really helpful to MMO games, but any MMO that is coming out soon was probably made before they could easily incorporate instancing...for example this Brit mmo I read about today that comes out next year was in the works in 2001.

I think that MMO based off the Source engine is the best bet, I can't confirm HL2 has support for G.I., but I don't think it's "Half-Life 2" that has the support...I think Source can support it, whether it does or not currently is beyond me. ATI just seems to be trying new things with drivers more than hardware, while nVidia is pushing their hardware and since I'm not using anything past a GF2 (not even using that!), I can't really say nVidia isn't doing things with drivers...but you never hear about that great new drivers thing nVidia has done. Always had stable drivers with them though, ATI I've had problems with, but never for very long and never one I couldn't fix easily (since drivers 3.4 anyway!).

If you wanted more info. on how the "CATALYST A.I." thing works...well basically CATALYST 4.9 and before would not have this feature, so what it does is use trilinear filtering for example on the top-level bitmap and use bilinear on the others, which was good for performance so...well with the new A.I. on the "low/standard" setting it applies a general change to filtering...it puts everything in trilinear filtering, but does so with a way that doesn't hurt performance usually. For COD I actually heard performance went down, but was still blowing it out of the water. (You can't tell because ATI keeps changing around their OpenGL files literally every month.) For Doom 3, it replaced some things with shaders and made it look different, but the fact you can't notice this in motion made it trivial to the fact Doom 3 had huge improvements. 10fps of pure quality is as ugly as 60fps of ugly settings....the trade-off comes at the point where you cannot realistically tell the difference in-game and still maintain that smooth gameplay 98% of the time.

Putting A.I. to the highest setting, it changes codepaths for specific programs by checking a list of EXE, just like nVidia did and denied for months. True the general changes with the ATI drivers will change things with progs such as 3DMark, the point is that ATI lets you turn these off for true benchmark purposes (if that's not an oxymoron I just don't know what is). The truth is, sometimes through experimentation only, you may find the general low setting makes things run and look better than the really high setting, depends on your system or program you're working with honestly.

Did I mention those bug fixes with HL2? Some versions of Catalyst just aren't meant to live...I have a collection and I'll tell you, some of the more rude versions can put a halt to even using the desktop...but since version 4.3, this hasn't happened to me yet. 4.1 made drawing in XP very sluggish and horrible, 4.2 fixed that, but 4.3 saved the day. I've seen some horrible drivers, not as bad as the old 2.x versions I hear about, but even the worst ATI drivers were just not that bad. I just have to admit, with my GF2 and Detonators like 33.x-45.x I never had a problem...ever (but it was a GF2 for Pete's sake, half of everything in the drivers didn't work with the card or the card didn't support them anyway) lol

OK, I mean it...I'm done!

reminds me of my horror with the latest nvidia drivers. I installed them when HL2 told me my drivers were out of date. lol. So I go to update and BAM!... good bye video.

In the end, I found out that the latest drivers for nvidia caused problems with dual video card (dual monitor) setups when combined with an nvidia fx5700.

I tried pretty hard to find a way to tell nvidia about this problem, but there absolutely NO way to contact them. I guess they don't want to have any customer relations.

wow...rofl!

I'm sorry to hear of your loss...no good card should go like that...its just not fair!

I should have closed in saying that I was able to find and install an older set of drivers that fixed my problem.

Oh...lol! Yeah, I've had to go back to older drivers (and sometimes newer ones!) before...like the situation with catalyst 4.1...was very sluggish so I went to 4.2...they released 4.2 soon after 4.1 and then 4.3, was very impressive...I thought they were going to keep doing that on a regular basis, but I think they got the idea "Don't tamper with it if this version has had less problems than the others."

The 4.1/2/3 were early this year I believe (if not last year) and I know this because I was always on top of drivers when I played CS six months ago...I think they stopped after they got a more stable driver in 4.3 and resolved most of the big issues. My favorite thing about ATI is (other than the neat red colors) that they work on all games, not just the new ones...I saw a fix for an old game that was like 2001/2002, just this year...that lets me know they do actually know of problems and want to solve them.

hey tiger

i got a 9800 pro 128 mb, put it in today

and it has catalyst drivers, i checked in the device manager, and its driver versions are 6.14.10.6343

i thought the latest were like 4.12 or something?

on these drivers i have, the skins in CS:S are weird, if i put tthem at high settings, it is laggy and the pistol goes black and the arms get very weird. any help? link to the latest drivers?

HEY its ham heres teh link :

http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/winxp/radeonwdm-xp.html?type=xp&prodType=graphic&prod=productsXPdriver&submit.x=19&submit.y=2


and yeah!