So with 5.6 ATI are releasing updates which
improve aspects of the install and usage of the drivers
and CCC as well as adding various features and support for
additional Operating Systems, but what’s in it for
the gamer? Well, ATI have been working hard to optimise
some of the more demanding games on the market to perform
better on their hardware, two of the most notable we feel
are Doom 3 and Chronicles of Riddick. Doom 3 now features
more efficient memory usage and Riddick has more efficient
storage of vertex data.
Here’s the full list of optimisations
from ATI
Our Verdict
Any performance increase is always welcome
so we ran some testing on our 3.6 P4, 1gb DDR2 /X800 256
system using Catalyst 5.5 and 5.6 and here’s the results
of the testing..
dont have flash installed? then click here
for a jpeg version of the above graph
That near 4fps increase in
performance is a 7% improvement between drivers.
dont have flash installed? then click here
for a jpeg version of the above graph
Running the same system through
Riddick we found that the game moved from being unplayable
at 1280x1024 to being playable at the same settings using
the latest Cats, the 4fps improvement is an 11% performance
improvement on our test system.
Future Changes to Catalyst Drivers
Along with the information
on Catalyst 5.6 ATI have provided us with information on
Catalyst 5.7 and 5.8, we’re not going to go into too
much detail on these though at this time…however here’s
a taster of what you can expect:
Cat 5.7
Multi GPU Catalyst Features
such as 8-14x Anti-Aliasing
Multi GPU Catalyst AI which determines the best settings
for your Multi GPU solution depending on the game being
launched.
Hypermemory Improvements for applications that use large
amounts of memory
Media Centre 2005 Extensions to help users better configure
their MCE 2005 display
Cat 5.8
New CCC Wizard which walks
novice users through setting up CCC to their satisfaction.
Improved HDTV support including support of DVI HDTV’s