OMEGA drivers improve image quality - dilema...

MonarchX

OMEGA man - sorry, I am here to criticise your drivers a little, no offense, be calm.
I use your drivers at the moment, I like your work, I am NOT complaining, just analyzing.

Anyway, I have tested Caalyst 3.8 and OMEGA Catalyst 3.8 (not the leaked DELL, but acctual 3.8).


I tested in OpenGL and Direct3D.

Here are my system specs:
ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe revision 1.04 motherboard, 1007 BIOS.
AMD AthlonXP 2100+ @ 2316Mhz @ 178Mhz FSB.
512Mb Corsair XMS PC3500 Dual Channel DDR RAM @ 2-2-2-10.
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro revision 3.0, with Zalman passive cooler.
Maxtor 80Gb 7200rpm 8mb cache ATA/133 hard drive
Maxtor 30Gb 7200rpm 2mb cache ATA/100 hard drive.
SoundStorm Sound.
nForce 2 LAN.
Antec 550W TruePower PSU.
WindowsXP Pro SP1.
DirectX 9.0a.
19" Samsung 955DF flat monitor.
Creative FPS1000 4.1 analogue speakers.
Logitech MX500 Optical Mouse
BellSouth 1.5Mbit down, 256Kbit up ADSL.
PC is highly optimized for gaming.

These are AVERAGE numbers, NOT just one-time benchmarking.
I ran each test 10 times. Five times without restarting, and 5 times restarting the PC.

VPU recovering was OFF for all tests. CPU was overclocked as always to 2316Mhz, but the card ran at STOCK speeds for all tests.

I installed the drivers properly using the DEVICE MANAGER, there were not errors/problems/issues whatsoever with drivers rather than long boot-up time (knows issue with 3.8)

I properly uninstalled drivers also, used Driver Cleaner 2.0, and a whole bunch of registry cleaning utilities.

Quake 3 (1.32 patch) results:
(4x AA, 16x AF trilinear filtering, no vsync, highest detail)
Catalyst 3.8 - 207.2fps (timedemo 1)
OMEGA 3.8 - 203.2fps (timedemo 1)

UT2003 results:
(4x AA, 16x AF trilinear (used rTool for that))
Catalyst 3.8 - Flyby 115.6, Botmatch 68.6
OMEGA 3.8 - Flyby 115.3, Botmatch 68.4

3DMark2001SE results:
(lowest possible settings in the Control Panel, no AA, no AF, default 3Dmark2001SE settings)
Catalyst 3.8 - 16548
OMEGA 3.8 - 16030 ()

Now, I should say that the differences themselves are not big of a deal. 207fps and 203fps is not noticeable.

Now, I am sort of posting about the concept and idea of OMEGA drivers.
They are SUPPOSE to be optimized rather for GAMING and IMAGE QUALITY rather than benchmarking.
Thats what I want to talk about.

I received reports that due to ATi's extreme image quality - there is not much (or "almost nothing") that OMEGA can do to improve the image quality. YET, there is MUCH for nVidia drivers.

We are talking about ATi though.

At this point - take away OMEGA's installer, utilities he includes, soft-mods, included Control Panel, TV-Out stuff (they are all useful though, and make OMEGA drivers a nice pack)

We are talking STRICTLY 100% IMAGE QUALITY and PERFORMANCE of the acctual DRIVERS (the .dll files) and what OMEGA does to the registry/INFO files to improve the quality.

Honestly, I cannot see a difference between OMEGA and Catalyst drivers, and I WISH I knew how to use Photoshop to compare with PIXEL-TO-PIXEL precision image quality of both types of drivers (does anyone want to teach me?).

So, my question - are there REALLY tweaks in OMEGA drivers for ATi cards that acctually IMPROVE image quality? If there are few or almost NONE - is the performance loss justifyable???

Just trying to get things striaght

Now, of course, OMEGA does not have to tell us WHAT tweaks he uses since others may copy his work (yet I would REALLY appreciate if he told me!), but maybe a some sort comparison screenshot that would show some difference in the image quality???

Anything?

I did not want to PM OMEGA since I thought its not just I who is interested in this.

Shadow Lady

do u really call that performance loss? besides, is not only about quality, is about more stable games, thats why it is tweaked for GAMING, also image quality cant really be much better than CATS but actually if u ask me its much more smooth, so is better quality, but well, someone with technical explanations will come

MonarchX

See, I don't fall for MUCH MORE SMOOTH and STABILITY unless I know what is being tweaked and how it affects the application.

Omegadrive

If you want to know the tweaks I make just open the INF file and start looking for them, they are clearly marked for anyone to see, that's why my work has been copied, becuase I don't hide anything from the users.
After you find the tweaks start looking for info all around the internet to know what each tweak does, like I did in the begining, then you'll know what I do and why.

BTW, as I said before, benchmarks means nothing for me, I do what I do because I like to do it and I help people out of my own free will, no one pays me and I don't care, I just feel good doing what I do and if you don't like my drives, don't use them, that's all, I don't have a gun pointing at you to force you to use them, Right?

Live and let live...

Warpy

Well said sir!

Stability is a huge thing for me! And Omega has never let me down. Many games have improved in terms of quality though.

1. BF1942
2. American Army Ops
3. Ravenshield

I had issues with shadow projection in American Amry ops and now this has been fixed with the latest Omega drivers based on Cat 3.8. I dont think the naked eye can determine anything over 60fps, so benchamrking over that is pointless to contrast driver performance between Omega and offical Cats. For me all my games run over 60fps even with 6AA and FSAA on MAX and with vertical sync and tripple buffer the Omega drivers work like a treat!

If you are unhappy with omega drivers dude, download the Cats and use Rage3dtweak, but all that optimisation can be done with mouse click from here

MonarchX

Indeed! Its just I wanted some info so that I can decide if I want to use your drivers or not.

See, before this thread, it was like: "There is a an applie pie and an X pie, I like Applie pie, but people say X pie is better, tastes better." Yet I don't know what X pie is made of. Maybe pumpkin pie, that everyone loves, but I personally hate pumpkin .

I hope you understand what I meant. Once I analyze the pumpkin tweaks - I'll decide!

MonarchX

Oh, thats a good load of them there...

MonarchX

OK, I just quickly went over all of those tweaks - pretty much all were meant to increase performance and quality, so whats causing lower benchmark score (asking myself lol)

MonarchX

AHA! LargeSystemCahce = 0 :O thats not good!

Omegadrive

If you look through many forums you'll see that there is a problem with ATI drivers if you have LargeSystemCache enabled, the system will boot up to a black screen and Windows will not load, this tweak fixes that problem, no more black screens at startup.

Warpy

Very true. I remember enabling that feature before I use to use Omegas in rage3dtweak and my system black screened and wouldnt boot. Totally screwed everything up - BIG TIME!

MonarchX

Yes, I know about it, but it does not affect my PC in any way though.