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DriverHeaven Article |
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The last time we wrote about a Catalyst release was the launch of the Catalyst AI feature quite a few months ago. We were very positive about the drivers then as they were completely stable with an excellent performance threshold. Since then ATI have been busy providing end users with additional performance and some bug fixes whilst behind the scenes they have been working hard on some new features and that’s what we’re previewing today… New Feature 1: Catalyst Mobility Catalyst Mobility is one of the enhancements to the Catalyst suite which we are most pleased with. Laptop users have always been second class citizens in the display driver world, visit most manufacturers websites and you’ll be lucky to find a recent driver release for your laptop….and very rarely will it be one within the last 3 months. Lets take Rock as an example. You pay £2000 for your high performance laptop, fire it up to play some games … it performs well but there is a little glitch with your favourite game so after a trip to the support site you find Catalyst 5.5 (which is running fine on your desktop)…unfortunately though the latest driver Rock have is from last December which also features the same bug (and depending on your manufacturer maybe it doesn’t have CCC either). There has been some salvation however for those regulars to Driverheaven in the shape of our excellent Mobility Modder tool which allows those on laptops to install ATI's newest driver sets - over 1,000,000 downloads would make me safely assume there is demand for mobility gaming! With regards to Catalyst 5.6, It is great to see ATI taking strides to improve the situation for those unwilling to run 3rd party modding tools. As of Catalyst 5.6 (Mobility X700 and X800 currently) ATI will be providing laptop drivers when posting the monthly Catalyst update and as well as the latest bug fixes you will get all of the functionality included in the desktop Catalyst release plus all of the functionality available to mobile parts such as device switching and power management.
Our Verdict: I’m sitting writing this article on my laptop featuring an X800 graphics card running the Catalyst Mobility drivers, I’ve been using various builds for a month now and they have worked flawlessly both when using windows/applications and when gaming. A great addition to the Catalyst suite im sure you will agree. CCC Performance and Functionality Visiting most forums discussing ATI display drivers you’ll find many comments from end users who have found previous versions of CCC slow to load and during use. I personally find it acceptable to use, however ATI have taken end user feedback onboard and have enhanced the performance of Catalyst Control Centre. In testing at ATI they have found the improvements in load time between catalyst 5.4 and 5.6 to have improved from around 5 seconds down to just over a second on a 9800 based system. ATI have also improved the responsiveness of CCC to remove all lag from actions perfomed in the application. Additionally ATI have worked
on the appearance of features such as the information centre
which is now easier to use and the system tray icon features
more functionality so you can do more without entering CCC
if it still isn’t to your tastes.
Our Verdict: I have to be honest and say that I’m not really seeing any improvement in load times over previous versions of CCC however once its opened the application is certainly more responsive and I haven’t experienced any lag when changing between sections or options. The Information Centre is also more user friendly and you can find any information you need very easily. For those interested in a preview of the responsiveness of CCC in Cat 5.6 you can download the following 9.5mb video file which will allow you to see how quickly the new CCC responds. You will also need the Camtasia Studio codec to playback the file, this is a free download and you can get it here (TechSmith Screen Capture Codec) . Ths codec has been chosen for its extremely high video quality.
Click the image above to watch the Catalyst improved responsiveness. If you have an issue streaming, right click and save as to your desktop, then play from there. New Feature 2: Linux Installer Have Linux ATI driver installs been a pain for you? If the answer is "yes" then this next feature is for you… the posting of Catalyst 5.6 includes a new Linux driver and a new installer which simplifies the install process. New Feature 3: Video Options Catalyst 5.6 introduces the new ATI video
features designed to make configuring your PC for playback
of video a stress free experience. For starters you have
the new Video preview which shoes a real time preview of
how your changes will affect the image quality displayed
to you. These changes include Gamma, Contrast, second display
settings and the choice of De-interlacing.
Also being activated in Catalyst 5.6, provided you have your Windows Media Player configured correctly you can enable the full hardware acceleration of Windows Media Video files using DX9 Shaders. ATI’s PDF information claims that there will be up to 50% reduction in CPU usage during playback which means a lower chance of dropping frames.
ATI’s AIW product line is in our opinion the best TV tuner/Multimedia solution on the market at this time however despite the huge range of functionality something lacking is support for Windows Media Centre 2005. As of Catalyst 5.6 though AIW products are fully supported in MCE 2005 and you’ll be able to use the operating system to its fullest capabilities. Our Verdict. I cant tell you how happy I am to have full MCE support for my AIW card, I love MCE 2005 however have not been so keen on the range of TV Tuner cards on the market that are supported by MCE. That’s no longer a problem though and the AIW and MCE work flawlessly together. You can even use the AIW and another tuner in dual tuner config! Real time video preview is also a huge plus in our opinion, the choice of image is spot on for demonstrating how the different processing affects the final image quality and it really does allow you to better configure your image. If you’re a broadband customer we recommend you check out the following file which will demonstrate the video preview section of CCC in action.
On the video performance front we’ve performed some video playback testing using Catalyst 5.6 with Media Player 10 on our Pentium 4 3.6Ghz CPU with our X800 256mb. Whilst high CPU usage isn’t experienced even without the new options enabled the changes in performance were noticeable. Without WMV acceleration using Cat 5.6 we
had an average CPU usage of 30% when playing the Step into
Water 1080 clip from the windows media site, moving to 5.6
with acceleration enabled we have a cpu usage of 26%. The
max CPU usage without acceleration was 51%, with acceleration
on the max experienced was 44%.
We also ran the same clip/settings on a Athlon 64 3200+ S754 system with a 9700Non pro 128mb and 512mb of memory, here’s the results on that system.
Click here to view acceleration differential
ATI’s recently released CatalystTM 5.6 Software Suite proved to be more stable than the equivalent publicly available NVIDIA offering. An executive summary of this test is now available and the full Display Adapter Stability Test Report issued by AppLabs and ATI Technologies Inc. will be available June 24, 2005. In June 2005, ATI commissioned AppLabs, a leading provider of quality assurance and testing, to conduct the test, pitting ATI's Radeon® display adaptors against comparable NVIDIA GeForce products. The objective of the test was to perform advanced software stress testing of the Radeon product line against the GeForce product line. 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. In this series of independent trials, ATI consistently earned higher stability rankings, scoring as high as 8.6 percent above NVIDIA. The AppLabs report concluded: "Based on the results of these software stress tests, the stability of the ATI Catalyst software exceeded that of their NVIDIA counterpart." "In a world that is increasingly dependent on visual technology, software stability is critical to ensure the best possible user experience," said Ben Bar-Haim, Vice President, Software, ATI Technologies. "We built the Catalyst software suite with the intent to deliver the most stable graphics software in the industry today, and these tests provide further validation to that commitment." "AppLabs offers the industry's most trusted and comprehensive set of testing resources," said Mike Fahnert, AppLabs executive vice president of client services. "The results of this test are clear: ATI's Catalyst Software Suite offers users of visually intensive applications the most stable 3D graphics driver available."
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