Catalyst 5.7 Drivers: Memory Limited Performance Improvements
by Josh Venning on August 13, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
Overall, the new 5.7 drivers will please the majority of ATI users out there, but the performance hit (even if it is small) with the higher memory cards isn't acceptable and might annoy some people. We feel that ATI should have at least given users the option to turn off HyperMemory for the higher memory cards, which should have completely resolved the issue.Another not-so-great thing about the new drivers is that some of the performance increase claims in the driver release notes are slightly misleading. While we did see a lot of the gains that they mentioned in most of the games, we found many of these increases to be with cards so limited (performance-wise) that they didn't matter. ATI claims in the release notes that the greatest gains in performance will be on cards with 128MB and 64MB of RAM. We found this to be true, but as we saw on the x600 128MB card, almost all of the tests that saw gains still had framerates that were unplayable. Likely, you will see some performance increases on 64MB cards, but you won't be able to run the games at the high settings that ATI claims will produce the highest gains.
That being said, the good definitely out-weighs the bad here. As we mentioned, hardly anyone will notice any decrease in performance in their games with the catalyst 5.7 drivers, and many will notice an increase, especially those with older ATI gear.
Now, the question is, who will this latest driver make the most happy? Our tests showed performance gains with the 128MB cards, and of the games that we tested, FarCry seems to get the best improvements with the new driver. So, if you own a 128MB ATI card and you play FarCry, you should be very happy indeed. Half-Life 2 also sees a lot of improvement, which should please many people as well (especially as many current and future games will be using HL2's Source engine). Undoubtedly, some of you with higher-end ATI cards may have missed the small print in ATI's release notes, cranked up the settings and hoped to see phenomenal gains; but instead, were crestfallen with the results. To be sure, your performance won't (necessarily) be worse, but with what ATI has to look forward to seemingly so far beyond the horizon, more might have been expected from this driver update.
Any way that you look at it, driver updates are free, and, with the exception of the mostly-harmless data swapping performance loss issue, catalyst 5.7 will serve to help many ATI customers. It's nice to know that ATI is taking care of its patrons (both old and new), but with NVIDIA so far ahead of the game right now in the high-end, we can't help but wonder what's happening at ATI's camp to cause these delays. So, as we wait for Crossfire and R520, we hope for the sake of competition that the new releases from the Canadian company will be enough to live up to the high standard that NVIDIA has set with the G70.
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nserra - Tuesday, August 16, 2005 - link
Why no one see if Ati claims are true?Well Why not test with the 6X AA....
Maybe enabling AF will not make the same difference as not enabling it....
Also I don’t understand the deal with always 4X AA.
I play almost all games with no AA, or 2X AA with Temporal AA enabled and 4X AF or 8X. Some times I lower Mipmap Detail Level option to Quality because almost all games give 0% image quality difference. I do that with DOOM3 and got almost 5% performance increase.
Jeff7181 - Sunday, August 14, 2005 - link
... memory optimizations help most when the memory is the limit. Nice to get some free performance... too bad you have to have a crappy card with crappy frame rates to begin with in order to see that free performance.Rand - Saturday, August 13, 2005 - link
It would have been nice had you tested how this impacted AGP and PCI-E graphics cards respectively, you commented that it should of course provide a greater benefit over PCI-E.Assuming you don't have any motherboards natively supporting PCI-E and AGP (Not the neutered AGP over PCI) you could have used an nForce 3 and nForce 4 board, given they perform quite similarly.
Any chance of doing any such tests?
On another note- what system did you test the cards on anyway?
I don't believe you made any mention of the system configuration, it's always beneficial to know the system specifications.
OvErHeAtInG - Saturday, August 13, 2005 - link
I did some extensive comparison benching with HL2 with 5.6 and 5.7 drivers. I run a 128MB 9800 Pro, 430/370, on a 4x AGP mobo, P4 2.85, 1GB DDR400 SC.I can second what they said about the 9700 Pro, as I had similar results. I play HL2 at 1280x1024, no AA. The only performance increases (as ATI specifies) come at that res and above WITH AA/AF enabled - which you do NOT play at with a 9800 pro.
So, in other words, certain res/settings go from "unplayable" to "almost playable." Which is VERY impressive, but useless. I did see a 35-82% increase in frames (much larger than what AT got):
HardwareOC Coast at 12x10, 4x8x:
Catalyst 5.6: 36.3 fps
Catalyst 5.7: 52.1 fps
HardwareOC d13c17 at 12x10, 4x8x:
Catalyst 5.6: 20.8 fps
Catalyst 5.7: 37.9 fps
At playable settings, we get a SLIGHT decrease in performance:
Guru3d Demo4 12x10 noAAnoAF
Catalyst 5.6: 103.3 fps
Catalyst 5.7: 100.3 fps
Shadowmage - Sunday, August 14, 2005 - link
Of course, this depends on what you call "playable" and "unplayable".For me, anything above 40fps is considered extremely playable.
OvErHeAtInG - Sunday, August 14, 2005 - link
Yes... if it stays above 40 fps :pJarredWalton - Saturday, August 13, 2005 - link
Strange... I took almost no performance hit when enabling 4xAF on my old 9800Pro with HL2. (I don't have it anymore, sorry - no new benches.) Going from 1024x768 to 4xAA brought less than a 5% decrease in FPS, while 1280x1024 was about a 30% performance decrease. Enabling 4xAA at 1280x1024 was another 5 to 10% loss. Of course, that was last year with 4.10 or so Cats, so I don't know what happened in the intervening time.OvErHeAtInG - Sunday, August 14, 2005 - link
4xAF only? Never tried it. Probably keeps it playable.I was using the HardwareOC benches at the time which seem to get held back by my CPU (which is weird), that's why I was running 12x10 4x8x to stress the card.
At 10x7, one can run AA AF on this card, but not 12x10... if it's still smooth enough for you, different strokes different folks
pxc - Saturday, August 13, 2005 - link
Performance went up on my XPRESS 200M 128MB w/HM laptop when I disabled the HyperMemory in the registry. :p I got rid of it before Cat 5.7 came out, so maybe the HM performance problems were fixed.AlexWade - Saturday, August 13, 2005 - link
ATI has had final 64-bit drivers for a while. Is it possible to benchmark those compared to the same 32-bit?