DH Article: Catalyst AI - In Depth

Veridian3

Also breaking cover today with the X700XT is ATI's new driver feature - CATALYST AI. You can read all about the new Catalyst Control Centre feature by clicking the link below...

"As well as the texture optimization algorithm there is a second aspect to Catalyst AI and that is the application specific optimizations and tweaks. Examples of these application specific items are forcing Anti Aliasing off in the driver for Splinter Cell or Prince Of Persia because AA doesn’t work in those titles. ATI have informed us that they will never specifically detect a synthetic benchmark with Catalyst AI optimizations however some benchmarks may see improved scores due to using game engines that have improvements within the driver. ATI have also guaranteed that they will only optimize if they can do so without any reduction in Image Quality."

Full Article

Dom

Nice article.

HawK

Some time ago there was talk of NV driver would recognise when a screenshot was taken, and used then a higher quality rendering for that screenshot..
Would that possibly be connected with this screenshot bug??

Btw looking forward to next driver, might even me persuading to use the CCC
Good Article, we are getting used to reading good article on DH

wiskerbizkit

So this is just an overhyped crock then

Veridian3

Whats overhyped about it and whats bad about it?

bug77

Great! So now we have a CCC only option that could be nothing more than a slider in the old CP. On top of that, ATi points out that the benefits of this option may cancel themselves under some circumstances. (Note that the NORMAL option was used anyway by the driver).
Way to go! Any more crap for us?

Veridian3

Wrong.

Becasue of AI starting with the next public release (4.10) the drivers/CCC will be letting the app decide what filtering is used. For example Unreal Tournament. In previous cats if the user enabled “quality” anisotropic filtering, only the first stage of textures had trilinear filtering applied. The rest of the texture stages had bilinear filtering applied. Cat AI. performs an advanced level of texture analysis (X series) to provide higher performance levels with no distinguishable difference in image quality.

There are also other advantages which i could list however i'd assume you'd be as closed minded about them too, so i wont bother.

Thats the second comment in this thread where someone thinks they know it all and actually they know very little about AI. People should start learning more about the new options before they start bitching imo. Starting here if reply's are not helpful, constructive or polite they will be deleted.

snake

R9600 series ? Does it mean R3xx series ?
And i'd like to see some R3xx bench with this option activated, because so many
people DON'T have a X800 and the results would be much more interesting for them...

bug77

Hey! I'm not close minded (at least, I'm trying not to be). I even own an ATi card and my next one will still be an ATi.
From what I've read, this seems to be just an adaptive AF. Why is it impossible to do with the old CP?
As ATi said, this requires more processing power, so it's basically a trade-off. If you know more, please, share with us.

CerebriX

no i believe r3xx just got the shaft my friend. bought my card in what was it, like december 03 so that makes my card only what like 9 months old(my 9800xt)? gee that just sucks. thanks for the kick in the nuts there.

Dwarden

it's not kick in nuts, if i understood this correctly it's only for RV360 and R4xx because of core architecture ...

Veridian3

In theory i guess some of the AI stuff could be added to the old CP...but not all, and going forward things will happen that are only possible in CCC to do with AI. Add to that the fact that CCC makes a lot of other stuff possible that the old CP doesnt and there is no reason to develop any features for the old CP because they wouldnt be as good as the CCC version or have partial functionality.

CCC is the way forward, is improving all the time and i dont really see the problem with using it over the old CP.

The_Neon_Cowboy

Quoted for truth! It's been happening since CCC day one. Some of the biggest complainers (like Tiribulus for example) have never even installed it little lone used it and have no Idea what they are talking about. But pretend to some how magically know it all....


The Old CP No, Why? Because CCC is the new CP and it's far easier and faster to make changes, fixes, add features etc and allows them to do things you could never do with the old classic CP.

more processing power thats in the advanced mode and as witten it uses a little more processing power so if you don't have a powerfull enough system it cancels it self out.

WisMerHill

Very nice and informing article Stuart ! well done.

a few remarks tho,
- some typo's i saw as: Nnumerous
- plz remove the CounterStrike source logo from the graph if you mean the source engine and not the CS source as you specificly noted.
- For UT2004, did u use UT2004, UT2003 or both ?
- UT2003 benchmark is not synthetic i believe since it measures actual game performance by loading up the game with a map with bots and action (could be wrong tho, dunno what exactly qualifies for the synthetic) Also there is a UT2004 benchmark if you're interrested, it might be closer related to the graphs than using the UT2003 bench.

no punn intented, just trying to help.

Veridian3

UT2004 was benched using actual gameplay.

UT2003 was benched using the inbuilt tool which does, as you say, use ingame maps +bots. It is classed as synthetic because its prerecorded and you have no interaction i think.

We are aware of the typo, thanks... strange how you can read something like a million times and never notice that til your reading it after posting.

BWX

It is strange, I've been wondering about that since grade school.

Anyway that is a pretty in-depth description of AI, but I still have a question.

It seems as though w/o CCC the optimizations are still in place but set to "standard"..

With the CCC you have 2 more options:

1) Turn them off all together (the optimizations)
-or-
2) Turn them up a level, which sometimes gives you an advantage and sometimes doesn't do to the CPU overhead..

Is that about the gist of it? If so, the people w/o the CCC are still basically getting the best performance, just a little less "adjustability"?

wiskerbizkit

I don't mean to be bitching if i am i'm sorry, I really do love this place.. Its alot of things that have happened in the last year or so IMO. having to save for the 9800 so i can play those dx9 based games at least i remember that being one of the selling points , come to find out half my games are "optimised for nvidia". Tricked into batlefield vietnam (which fried two psu's on me) and here comes the x800 stealing the glory (and CCC features) and a massive pricetag to boot! Its so frusterating trying to get the most performance out of my 9800 while looking over my shoulder at my bro's rig , Identical to mine except 5900xt, and he's having a blast. Doom 3 runs flawlessly, wish i could say the same for me.

Guess what i mean is the preview got my hopes up for something i could use

/vent exit

WisMerHill

About the UT2003 bench (and consequently the UT2004) idd it's prerecorded but in the benchmark folder in UT2003 there are a number of batfiles which you can run and modify to your own wishes. HardOCP for instance always uses their own script for it. Also in the Stuff folder within the benchmark folder there are the ini's and settings used by the benchmark.exe, you can freely edit those as well. So you might call it synthetic but you have great freedom to construct your own unique UT200x benchmark, it's only harder when comparing to the default but that isn't the point here so that's no issue.
I actually believe it's better to make your own because of the control you have over it and no company knows what you'll actually test so "illegal" optimisations are not an option anymore (like the predefined path in 3Dmark which caused such a stir last year.)

About the typo's i sure know, don't we just all have that

Zardon

He can look over his shoulder at you when you are both playing Half life 2. Doom 3 is only one game, and not a particularly enjoyable one at that.

wiskerbizkit

I hope to god you are right. maybe i should be directing my anger towards nvidia for whoring themselves out lol

Matt

If you read the part about AI. Its a CPU Optimization, which uses a lookup table. I'm no driver programmer but i guess this can be added to any series. Correct me if i'm wrong.

Which if this is true, i'm now looking at nvidia as my next card. After the way they sold XT's for HL2.
My 1 year old 9800 pro for the bin already lol

WaltC

The most common mistake I see is the notion that currently ATi's trilinear optimizations are "always on" simply because the user can't manually turn them off. According to what ATi has said, the Catalyst trilinear opts are self-switching on & off, so they are never "on" in the sense that they are always on and always running optimized. In cases such as colored mipmaps and other cases in games in which ATi discovered that their opts would cause IQ degradation, the Catalysts auto-switch their tri-opts off automatically without user intervention so that normal trilinear IQ is maintained. (This is probably why the difference for the Catalysts between AI "off" and "on" in terms of frame-rate performance isn't as great as might be expected, at least in contrast with ForceWare's tri-opts implementation, because when "on" the Catalysts default to a self-switching state, whereas when "on" nVidia's drivers default to "always on" and operate whether IQ is degraded or not, unless the Forceware user manually shuts them off from the cp.)

The "AI" nomenclature (assuming "artificial intelligence" is what is meant) indicates that what ATi is doing is offering users a choice between using their "intelligent" self-switching tri-opts (meaning that when they are on they self-switch between on & off as each game requires and are never actually "always on") and an "always off" setting in which straight trilinear is always run and does not auto-switch on & off as is the case currently.

I know that some people will be happy to hear the news about the upcoming Catalyst AI, and I'm certainly not unhappy to hear it as at the least it will deflect the current undeserved PR criticism ATi gets over its self-switching tri-opts implementation, but I think it's important to remember that trilinear optimizations are *not* IQ-enhancing features akin to AA and AF, but rather are performance optimizations designed to increase frame-rate performance in games without sacrificing normal trilinear ("always off") IQ. As such, tri-opts really don't lend themselves well to "always on-off" manual settings but should, if they are used at all, intelligently switch on and switch off *without user intervention when playing a particular game* so that the goal of trilinear IQ with increased frame-rate performance can be achieved. That's my opinion, anyway...