Allan: -Hi Terry, Andrew – thanks for setting aside some time for a chat today, I have some questions on the catalyst suite and its progress this year for you guys, some of which have came from members on my site, before we get into those could you detail your daily activities within ATI?

Terry (Catalyst Maker) : Thanks for taking the time to talk to us Allan. We are big DriverHeaven fans and read it daily and I spend a lot of time on your forums. I would be surprised if any DriverHeaven readers don’t already know who we are and what we do but just in case here goes.

My title is officially Senior Product Manager – Software. In the simplest terms my job involves two functions. One is forward looking (defining the future of CATALYST) and one is present day (educating users about CATALYST). That of course involves many tasks such as interviews like this one, or spending time with users in the forums.

Andrew (ATI Dude): Thanks for setting up this interview Allan! As Terry mentions above, both of us check out DriverHeaven every day to read the news postings, articles and of course the forums. My official title here at ATI is Software Product Manager – my job involves defining the CATALYST roadmap as well as interacting with press, customers and of course our end-users.

Allan: As both of you are involved with improving your customers experience with drivers and gaming, do either of you actually play computer games in your spare time, either for “research purposes” or just for the hell of it? What has been your favourite titles this year? Either of you own a console(s)?

Terry: No I don’t play any games ;) I actually do have a PS2 for a console and play a lot of sports games when I have people over. My girlfriend beats me bad on the latest game we are hooked on Burnout3: Takedown (which is one of the best PS2 games of all time)

As for PC games I played quite a few this year. Aside from all the obvious my favorite sleeper game of the year was one that you actually recommended to me Allan, it was called The Suffering.

Andrew: I always try and get a few hours of gaming in every week. As far as favorite games this year, Half Life 2 was very cool and worth the wait, I also played the Call of Duty United Offensive expansion pack. I really like role playing games so I’d like to check out Vampire Bloodlines too.

Allan: How do you feel about this year with regards to Catalyst, has the introduction of the catalyst control centre been as you wanted?

Andrew: The last year has been fantastic for CATALYST. Every monthly CATALYST release delivers the latest and greatest that our software team has developed. I think it’s an extremely good thing that our end users are always playing with the latest ATI software. As far as the CATALYST Control Center goes I think it was received quite well, but as with all new products there are areas we can improve. We will continue to focus on improving performance, adding new features, etc. to make it the absolute best product available. When Microsoft releases .NET 2.0 (there is an early beta available, but it is missing a lot of the fixes required), in spring 2005 we will see another improvement in performance. I am very confident that in the coming months we’ll see CCC running faster and introducing a lot of really cool features, like application manager, etc.

Terry: To add to Andrew’s point above this year has been a record year for CATALYST. We track user satisfaction based on end user polls every month. This year has seen some incredible numbers on the driverheaven polls and we have cracked a 9 out of 10 rating on many of the CATALYST releases. This year marks the first time our users have rated our software so high.

Allan: Overdrive was always quite a disappointment, now you have released Overdrive 3 can you tell us the range of cards this will support and how you feel this side of the software suite is improving and developing. Have you more ideas planned for overdrive in 2005?

Terry: It’s only a disappointment if you are expecting to overclock your card as high as you want. You must remember that Overdrive is a function that is fully guaranteed. We are the only graphic vendor that lets you get higher than stock speeds without voiding your warrantee. With this in mind we saw an opportunity for improvement with Overdrive.3. It is currently available on the X850 XT-PE product and will be rolled out to more products in the future (we can’t bring it back to older products). Overdrive 3 is basically an overclocking tool that you can adjust core and memory clocks through sliders and also has thermal protection. This is the best overclocking implementation possible that can maintain a customer’s warrantee. The future of Overdrive is more at the API level to let our board partners come up with cool solutions of their own.

Allan: Catalyst AI is certainly a very cool feature which we covered on Driverheaven before, can you give us the definitive explanation of exactly how ATI develop and update this within the driver, im particularly interested with the fact it can detect possible problems with a game, for example disabling anti aliasing or anisotropic filtering on a game per game basis. Is this going to be updated and improved every monthly driver release or is there a different game plan for this aspect of Catalyst?

Terry: Yes CATALYST AI will be updated monthly. When we find cases that need application detection to work around a game bug we will add it to our list of .exe’s that we detect and work around for.

Andrew: Just to add to Terry’s comments, CATALYST A.I. is a very powerful tool that allows ATI to detect an applications .exe file and either apply game fixes that we couldn’t have easily applied before, or enhance performance of games, by replacing shaders, or doing other forms of optimizations. The key point though it that none of our optimizations will ever reduce visual quality in any discernable way – we only want to improve the gamers experience.

Allan: While we are on the subject of AI, does this mean “artificial intelligence” or “ATI intelligence”? ;) … and another question im asked by members, can you explain the differences between AI off, standard and advanced – what exactly is going on?

Terry: Here’s the inside scoop. When we developed this feature we internally referred to it as AI for artificial intelligence. For many months we all just called it AI. When it was time to ship the feature we decided to keep the internal name. We though it sounded pretty cool and had synergy with what the feature does.

So to be honest the AI in CATALYST AI is just a leftover from our design days. It doesn’t really stand for anything now, but it is in homage to the artificial intelligence label we had during development.

As for the different levels it is simply the level of optimization that is being applied.

Andrew: When the user disables CATALYST A.I., all forms of app detection are disabled as well as all generic optimizations, so in this mode everything is turned off. As users will see, the performance of games will drop, and the visual quality will either remain the same at best, and could even drop in visual quality.

Allan: Recently when I was over visiting you guys in Canada I was talking to Joe Chien (not sure of sp please fix!) - he was heading up the team rewriting and working on the opengl driver,. How is this progressing to date, can you detail any plans regarding this? Can the end user expect a driver release with massive improvements, incremental gains over 2005 or do ATI want to put all their man power into the D3D side of the driver?

Terry: Joe is a great guy but has a big mouth ;) He was in charge of the R3xx drivers, he was head of our DirectX drivers, and now has taken over our OpenGL drivers.
There seems to be a misconception though. We are not re-writing our OpenGL driver from scratch. What we are doing is re-writing certain portions of it to improve stability and performance. There will by no means be massive performance gains after this work is complete. This effort will attempt to improve the quality and speed of our OGL driver as much as possible, but until it is done (which still is a ways away) we cannot speculate on how much of a performance improvement users will see.

Allan: Now, while im on the subject of driver support and improvements how is the linux side shaping up? Dave Orton told me early this year ATI would be stepping up linux support. I know it’s a relatively small portion of the gaming market, but how can we see this changing over 2005? New features? Long standing issues resolved? 64 bit driver support?

Terry: We don’t really view gaming as the main usage of Linux. We are more focused on server and workstation support currently. With this in mind, we still want to support Linux gaming as much as possible. Moving into 2005 we have a much larger team of developers working on Linux, and we will have much more PR activities around it. Yes to all three of your questions (features, stability, and 64 bit driver support)

Allan: A tricky question which always crops up, we have gone into this before in past interviews and you guys know Driverheaven has its own “mobility modder” but is there any light at the end of the tunnel for mobility users with regards to getting updated drivers direct from ATI, even if they lose specific hotkey support? Or is this still totally in the hands of the OEMs.

Terry: Well we are both laptop users and we both would like to use CATALYST ? .

I will let you and your readers put two and two together……

Allan: With regards to .net version 2, Does this have any direct effect on your development of CCC compared to the existing official .net 1.1?

Andrew: As noted above in the other question about CATALYST, and in particular the CATALYST Control Center – the introduction of .NET 2.0 won’t really require much development work, but it will really improve the performance and fix some bugs that exist in the current .NET 1.1 framework. So we’re definitely looking forward to Microsoft releasing .NET 2.0

Allan: Its been a positive year for improved ATI driver support, one thing that springs to mind would be the fact ATI have released several hotfix drivers at times of need, is this something you guys will maintain on a regular basis throughout 2005 (if the need arises).

Terry: For sure. Any time we have a need for a hotfix to be issued we will do everything we can to rush it out.

Allan: VPU recovery is a mystery to most people in the fact it doesnt always appear to help matters much, can you explain the technology behind this and is it being tweaked and refined throughout driver revisions?

Andrew: VPU Recover works by detecting if the graphics processor has hung, in the event of a graphics processor hang the driver will attempt to reset the graphics processor – it does succeed, but not 100% of the time, also many hangs occur as a result of another application hanging the driver, not the graphics processor. If this happens the driver will hang and there is nothing VPU Recover can do about it. We always look into improving features, but something like VPU Recover is not improved upon in every driver release, as it is rather complex.

Allan: Smartshaders are often overlooked and the programmable shaders had a rise in popularity for a while, im aware this is a side project for the guys involved in the creation and support, but they no longer work. Any plans to fix this?

Andrew: I just tried out the Smartshader effects for both Direct 3D and OpenGL and they seem to work fine (I have an alpha of CAT 5.2 on my system :-). But you’re right, the shader effects initiative were more of side project for a couple of developers than a full time project, so we probably won’t see any new effects for a while.

Allan: Is 9x/ME a dead operating system to ATI now? Will there be any future drivers released for this os?

Terry: Yes it is dead. All facts point to that. Microsoft is not accepting submissions for certification. OEM’s are not shipping systems with it. Our statistics show it is less than 5% install base and steadily dropping. Finally the number of tech support calls we are receiving on this Operating System is close to zero. All these factors indicate for me that our MS focus has to be on Windows 2000/XP and beyond. I do not expect to release any more driver updates (unless there is a major bug in some new game or something, in which case we may look at fixing it)

Allan: With regards to the whole CCC package, have ATI some internal prioritization given to certain aspects of refinement and improvements? You ran a poll on Driverheaven a while ago, do our membership votes help steer ati in a specific direction?

Example:
1 (most important) – bug fixes
2 – speed improvements
3 – new features
4 – new skins

Andrew: We definitely have priorities regarding all of ATI’s software projects. Specifically for CCC the poll which was run at DriverHeaven is identical to our priority list. Our top priority is always to fix as many bugs as possible, secondly we push ourselves to improve performance, and third on the list is the addition of cool new features for CCC. At all times we have a number of developers working on all three of these. Consolidating all of our developers onto just one of the tasks would have diminishing returns; doubling the number of developers working on something doesn’t always equals doubling the output :-) As far as creating new skins, we’re hoping end users come up with some cool new ways to skin CCC. BTW those polls you hold are very important to us, they do help us set our priorities and let us know what we need to improve upon, so everyone vote!!

Allan: What is the status on the ATI DVD player? Any new versions being released soon?

Terry: Let me reverse the question. What new functionality are you looking for?
Ps. the ATI DVD player is not from ATI, it’s from a 3rd party.

Allan: Will hydravision ever be incorporated into CCC as a whole package or are there any plans to update the software as a standalone program, to perhaps catch up with third party programs like ultramonitor 2.

Andrew: The goal within 2005 is to fully incorporate HYDRAVISION into CCC. We will significantly improve the user interface so that current HYDRAVISION functionality is much easier to use, and we’ll also be adding a lot of cool new features to make the whole multi-monitor/multi-application experience that much better.

Allan: There is a lot of untapped potential with CCC right now, can you hint at any possible future additions to the suite, any cool functionality to be added soon? Will automatic driver update feature appear in 2005?

Andrew: Automatic updates will be coming in 2005, as will the incorporation of HYDRAVISION into CCC. Some of the other features coming, include the new Color Radiance slider, a lot of new video functionality, new functions added to the CCC system tray, full support for the entire RADEON series of products, new HDTV functionality/wizard, plus a ton of other stuff, but I don’t want to give everything away ?

Allan: Have we any hot skins to come and will these be offered by auto updates?

Andrew: Internally we won’t be developing any new skins, but we’d love to see the end-user community come up with some cool new skins, in fact we’re hoping to see some really great stuff from the DriverHeaven skinning contest we setup with you a few weeks ago. Please submit your entries to Allan please!!

Allan: The “car” preview in CCC, will you give users the option to disable this feature and is it possible to offer different previews or even zoomed up previews to better distinguish between AA and AF settings (for those who need it).

Andrew: As you mentioned CATALYST 5.1 will give users the ability to disable the 3D preview, for those users who do not wish to see the car updating (this will also significantly improve the responsiveness of adjusting 3D settings, as we’ll no longer be updating the real-time OGL demo every time). You’re right it would be great to include the functionality to zoom-in, etc. but the main issue is that adding that functionality would cause a performance drop in CCC (something we’re trying very hard to avoid).

Allan: Are you still planning on tweaking the CCC in a way that it respects the users browser preferences (such as the welcome and help page being supported in firefox and other non IE browsers)

Andrew: Yes that is something we’re working on, and will be addressed early in 2005.

Allan: Terry on driverheaven each month you release a driver poll asking users to rate the drivers from 1-10, can you share in what way this information is used by ATI internally?

Terry: We use that information many ways. First and foremost is to see how successful each release is. Secondly we use this information for our big OEM and AIB customers. They want to see our progress. Third it is used by our bosses to see how big a bonus we get at the end of the year (well not really, but they do look at the date). Here is what my charts look like with the latest data as of the time of this interview. I must admit I’m not happy we went below a 9 rating, and this is something we have to push back up. The last two postings seem to be some of the best of the year. I guess our progress has caused people to set the bar higher for us in the future.

Allan: Can you explain the reasoning behind grouping D3D and opengl into the CCC? In the old CP these options were separate.

Andrew: Two main reasons for this change.
1) A lot of novice end-users don’t even know what Direct3D and OpenGL are, when they buy a game off the shelf it’s just a 3D game as far as their concerned. So to make things simpler for them we wanted to offer 3D adjustments only.
2) Even most advanced users admit that if they want to turn on AA or AF for one API chances are they’ll also want it enabled for the other. If they really are that picky, we offer profiles which allow users to configure completely different 3D settings on an app by app basis.

Allan: Windows media acceleration, can you detail how this works, and which chips it supports, is it using the shader unit of the GPU, will it work with VC1 and AVC?

Andrew: Windows media acceleration is supported on all Direct X9 hardware, because as you mentioned it uses shaders to display video. WMV acceleration allows the graphics processor to handle video operations that used to be done on the CPU, so it frees up CPU usage significantly.

Allan: Have either of you beaten Half life 2 yet? What did you think, worth the wait?

Andrew: I haven’t finished it yet, still working on it though. We’ve also had some fun with HL2 deathmatch at work too!

Terry: I actually finished the game last night (Dec 6th). I loved the game both from a graphics and game play perspective. I have to say my only complaint is that the ending was too easy. There were many scenes in the middle of the game that seemed harder than the end.

My general suggestion to game developers is get rid of the platform jumping stuff. It may have been cool in the Donkey Kong days but I hate having to save a game and then try jumping from platform to platform and land on an exact spot. I end up reloading 20 times to finally get it and it bores me ;-)

Allan: Looking back at 2004, rate the top three games of the year, and tell us your most memorable experience of the year.

Terry: In no particular order my favorites were Half-Life2, The Suffering, and Winning Soccer 11 for the Playstation2 (ya ya I know…) As for the most memorable experience of the year, it would easily be my three and a half week vacation to my home turf of Greece during the Olympics. That was for sure my best vacation ever, and seeing the Olympics was out of this world!

Andrew: Hmmm top three games of the year, I would have to say Half-Life 2, COD United Offensive expansion pack, and FarCry. As far as most memorable experience of 2004 – well I’m a huge Metallica fan, and I got to see them twice (front row!!) which was very cool.

Allan: Any plans for Christmas and the new year – do ATI hold any cool parties for employees?

Terry: Well ATI has graciously given us the whole week between Christmas and New Years. I plan on relaxing during that time and save up some energy for an insane New Years Eve party. As for the ATI Holiday (I think it’s not politically correct to call it Christmas ?) party, all our regional offices have parties with the biggest one in Toronto (where our headquarters is) with over 2000 people. Unfortunately, I won’t be going this year as I have a prior engagement.

Andrew: Like Terry said it will be great to have the whole week off between Christmas and New Years! I plan on just taking it easy and catching up on some game playing.

Terry/Andrew: Well as always we wish all your readers a great holiday season, and may 2005 bring everyone all they desire!

DH - YOU ROCK!

Allan: Guys, thanks for the time, we all appreciate it

 

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