Good Benchmarking Practice:
Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times and the median result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables that will follow. All games/applications had their latest patches applied.

Additional Notes:

Currently OpenGL games are not optimised in the Catalyst Drivers and we have therefore not tested any openGL titles. For further information on this please see the Q+A with Phil Rogers at the end of the article.

Also, as this article is intended to be a look at the theoretical possibilities of the Dual Core optimisations we have used 3 of the games which ATI indicated should receive boosts from the Dual Core Optimisations. Our results will be checking if ATI's suggested gains are realised and the benefits which would be achieved in real world usage as we will be testing sections of gameplay with FRAPS.

Before we conclude the article lets take a few moments to get a little more information on the Dual core optimisations direct from ATI. For this we were fortunate enough to have a few moments of Phil Rogers time. Phil is ATI's Senior Software Architect and is responsible for ATI's performance enhancements and dual core work.

Driverheaven: Can you give our readers a simplistic explanation of how the dual core optimisations work?

Phil Rogers: The D3D driver interface delivers work to the driver in large batches, encoded in an execute buffer. It is the driver's job to parse this execute buffer, translate it to a form that our hardware can process and deliver it to the hardware. With the dual core optimizations, we move the bulk of this driver processing to a worker thread that runs on the second core.

Driverheaven: What is the most common scenario (game section/technology) that results in a dual core system using 5.12 showing higher performance than a single cored 5.12 system. (Making the assumption that the 2 CPUs would perform the same without DC driver optimisations)

Phil Rogers: Many games are CPU limited at low and medium resolutions, now that the hardware is so fast. Also, the majority of games are single threaded leaving that second core idle. By moving driver processing to the second core in such situations we get the driver to run in parallel with the game, reducing overall CPU time.

Driverheaven: Where do you see the optimisations becoming more useful in the future? Is there a particular game which will be released that could benefit greatly from the dual core optimisations?

Phil Rogers: Graphics hardware performance is on a much steeper curve than CPUs. This means that optimizing the CPU side will only get more important going forward.

Driverheaven: OpenGL dual core optimisations are not currently included in the drivers, are there any plans to add them?

Phil Rogers: Yes, but I cannot say more about that right now :-)

Driverheaven: Will ATI be working with game developers to help them exploit the optimisations in future releases?

Phil Rogers: Absolutely. In general, multithreading is more effective the higher up the software stack it is done. Applications can make better use of additional CPUs than the driver, since they have more domain knowledge. There are also ways in which the game developer can arrange their data to be more "multithreading friendly" for the driver.

Driverheaven: How do the driver optimisations differ between AMD and Intel CPUs - if at all?

Phil Rogers: Currently we use the same multithreading path for both AMD and Intel. I suspect that your question comes from seeing larger gains on Intel for some applications. The optimizations are equally effective on both CPUs, but we tend to hit graphics hardware performance limits sooner on AMD due to their faster single core performance.

One other thing to note on this is that our multithreading path is also enabled for Intel's Hyperthreading. Again it is the exact same path. Naturally we see a smaller gain for hyperthreading vs dual core, but its nice to deliver some value from this work to the large installed base of HyperThreaded PCs.

Conclusion

Looking at our results its fair to say that there are some reasonable benefits to be had from the dual core optimisations, this of course has the caveat that you will only see major gains in speed when you are experiencing CPU bottlenecks (which require lower resolutions). Therefore high res gamers may not see the benefit of the new driver code at all times, the benefits will be there though, and in our opinion its just good practice to have your dual core utilsed as much as possible - after all you've paid your money for the benefits and the more the core is maximised the better your system will perform overall.

As Phil mentioned in his final response during our mini interview all HT enabled Pentium 4's are supported by ATI's dual core optimisations so if your a HT user Catalyst 5.12 and above are a recommended install... those of you with X2's should have this as a must have though and its pretty clear from the results that if your a Pentium D user who likes to game these drivers will improve your experience across a wide range of games.

Performance increases for free are never a bad thing!