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Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed

 by Ryan Smith on December 11, 2005 3:22 PM EST
58 Comments | Add A Comment
58 Comments
Halo

Halo represents both a curse and a blessing among possible titles to benchmark. As one of the first FPSs to make good use of SM 2.0 and a very popular title on both the PC and Xbox, it's an important title to use to see what ATI could do with the newest feature of the 9700 Pro; but at the same time, it was still a console port that was in many ways mediocre. While we would have liked to test Gearbox's "Custom Edition" that implements properly optimized shaders, the lack of single player support in that version has limited us to the less optimized original version of the game. The lack of AA support has also limited us to only benchmarking Halo without any advanced features turned on.

Halo

First of all, the 0 next to the Catalyst 3.00 drivers is not a typo; with the 3.00 drivers, Halo suffers from a massive stuttering problem that caused the time demo to play at unequal speeds and otherwise returned senseless benchmark results, and was excluded as a result. Beginning with the 3.04 drivers then, we see Halo receive a significant performance boost late in to the life of the 9700 Pro, rather than in the beginning where we'd expect it. ATI has attributed this to z-buffer optimizations in their driver for dealing with this game; this optimization was good for a nearly a whopping 25% improvement in performance, and it's a shame that ATI didn't do this earlier. Otherwise, we see a drop off between the 3.04 and 3.06 drivers, and then a slow increase of 10% through the 5.05 drivers; the drop off is not significant at less than 11%, but it's still noteworthy that the game actually got a bit slower before its release around the time of the 3.06 drivers.



Catalyst 4.02 versus 3.09 (mouse over to see 3.09)

Looking at the screenshots, there is a very noticeable IQ difference, but not one that correlates between any of the performance changes. The above is a comparison between the Catalyst 3.09 drivers and the 4.02 drivers, with a focus on the flashlight. With the 3.09 drivers, the light has a very noticeable hard edge, while this becomes a soft edge under the 4.02 drivers. This is something that we mentioned previously in our Fall 2003 IQ Analysis, where with the 3.09 drivers, our 9800 Pro was doing hard edges while NVIDIA's 5900 was doing the proper and more complex soft edges. ATI fixed this problem after the 3.09 drivers - the flashlight was working correctly without a performance hit. While we'll never know if it was a bug or an intentional way to improve frame rates (as ATI never mentioned this in any of their release notes), it's good to know that they could get it right without a performance hit.

As all the other pre-3.09 shots are indistinguishable from our 3.09 shot, and all post-4.02 shots are just like our 4.02 shot, there appears to be no other IQ change other than the flashlight fix. Overall, Halo stands apart as a game that received a constant (if small) improvement in performance, and the second game to receive an IQ-related fix.

Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne 3dMark 2003
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  • timmiser - Wednesday, December 14, 2005 - link

    That is why they are so good. It shows that the early drivers are already well opitimized and that there is not much improvement over the months/years from driver release to driver release.

    Nvidia on the other hand, will have a driver release (typically around the launch of a competing ATI card) that all of a sudden shows a 25% gain or some ungodly number like that. This shows us that either A) Nvidia didn't do a very good job with opitimizing their drivers prior to that big speed increase, or B) held the card back some via the driver so that they could raise the speed upon any threat (new release) by ATI.

    Either way, it reflects poorly on Nvidia.

  • DerekWilson - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link

    lots of people have requested more modern games.

    our goal at the outset was to go back as far as possible with the drivers and select a reasonable set of games to test. most modern games don't run on older drivers, so we didn't consider them.

    for future articles of this nature, we will be including a couple modern games (at the very least, half-life 2 and doom 3). we will handle the driver compatibility issue by starting with the oldest driver that supports the game.

    very new games like FEAR won't be useful because they've only got a driver revision or two under their belt. Battlefield 2 is only about 6 months old and isn't really a suitable candidate either as we can't get a very good look at anything. My opinion is that we need to look at least a year back for our game selection.

    thanks for the feedback. we're listening, and the next article in the series will definitely incorporate some of the suggestions you guys are making.

  • Cygni - Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - link

    I cant belive people missed this point. I thought it was pretty obvious in the text of the article. Throwing teh gaem of teh futar at a videocard running drivers from 1997 is going to have obvious consequences. That doesnt give you anyway to measure driver performance increases over time, whatsoever.

  • nserra - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link

    I agree.

    But I think the best candidate would be the R200 (8500) for testing,
    since everyone said it was a good card (hardware) with bad drivers (software).

    So a good retro test is how the R200 would standup with recent drivers VS nvidia geforce 3/4 with the older games.
    The all idea is to see if 8500 could keep up with geforce 3/4 if it had good drivers.

    Resuming:
    2002/2003 games | radeon8500 card | 2002/2003 driver
    2002/2003 games | geforce3/4 card | 2002/2003 driver

    2002/2003 games | radeon8500 card | 2005 driver
    2002/2003 games | geforce3/4 card | 2005 driver

    2004/2005 games | radeon8500 card | 2005 driver
    2004/2005 games | geforce3/4 card | 2005 driver

  • JarredWalton - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link

    The problem is that the R200 is no longer acceptable for even moderate gaming. If you have a 9700 Pro, you can still get reasonable performance on almost any modern game. Yes, you'll need to drop to medium and sometimes even low quality settings, but a 9700 Pro is still three or four times (or more) as fast as the best current IGP.

    I'm not working on these articles, but personally I have little to no interest in cards that are more than 3 generations old. It might be intersting to study from an academic perspective, but for real-world use there's not much point. If enough people disagree with this, though, I'm sure Ryan could write such an article. :)

  • Hardtarget - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link

    Neat article idea but I would deffinitely of thrown in one more game, a modern one. Probably Half Life 2, see how it does on teh older hardware in general, and see what sort of driver revisions do for it. Would of been pretty interesting.

  • Avalon - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link

    I think Far Cry, HL2, and Doom 3 ought to be tested. I remember running those games on my 9700 pro. Far Cry and D3 ran just fine at 10x7, and HL2 ran great at 12x9. I'm pretty sure quite a few people were using these cards before upgrading, in these games.

  • WileCoyote - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link

    My conclusion after seeing the numbers: ATI prefers directing money/man-power/time/resources towards synthetic benchmarks rather than improving game performance. I consider THAT cheating.

  • Questar - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link

    Explain the image quality increases then.

    Or do you consider nvidia lowering image quality from generation to generation an improvment?

  • Jedi2155 - Monday, December 12, 2005 - link

    Explain the Halo benchmark then?
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