ATi Catalyst Future

m|Ke

HEXUS has managed to get an early peak at the latest ATI Catalyst report which covers features made available in Catalyst releases and gives you the 'heads up' on upcoming releases and what features those will have. http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xMjk0

It pretty much sums up as:

- New CCC wizard which will run in 640x480.
- Emerald MCE (Media Center Edition) support.
- Catalyst AI will figure out the best performance solution for your set-up such as Alternate frame rendering, scissor and super-tiling modes for both D3D and OpenGL apps.
- Crossfire will enable new anti-aliasing modes of 8x through to 14x.
- Crossfire promises performance improvements of up to 100% with initial support on RADEON X800s and X850s.
- Control Panel is coming to the end of it’s life and 8.16, August, will be the last driver to support it.
- CCC will become the only UI available and from 8.17, September, only CCC will supported.
- All next gen ATI products will support CCC only.

Some interesting information for ATi users.

mkk

Good to know. I hope and expect that they will keep offering separated downloads.

studbagel9

Are 8.16 and 8.17 dates or future catalyst driver versions you're referring to?

Mr cairo

bit worrying as the poll on the mainpage clearly shows that nearly 50% of voters prefer the classic control panel ...... me included

Spuddy

That's bad news, very bad news.

H3X4D3C1M4L

Looks like they finally decided to make the move

Shadow Lady

they shouldnt thou, not while there is still many users that dont like/hate the CCC

Poppi

I don't even install the control panel, CC or CCC, with the drivers. Good ol' ATT has all I need, without the bloat. Probably won't ever need to worry about CCC as I am going through some very surprising support with a ticket I submitted to ATI. First time I ever submitted a ticket to ATI and expected first class solutions.

OmegaRED

omegadrivers to the rescue! Currenly thats the only way to get AI without the stupid laggy CCpanel. ATI is really pissing me off with this move and I hope it backfires on them. I dont care how much they tweak it the CCpanel is bloatware and everyone knows it.

Shadow Lady

I hear you, if it wasnt cauze i need to turn AGP to 4x i would not even install Ati's CP, but still is good to have the CP to some single changes

I'll keep saying this anyway: bad move ATI, bad move

Sobek

Absolutely 100% correct! If they do ditch the standard Control Panel, then somethings gone seriously wrong...CCC is just plain pathetic.

yoda133113

actually with 5.6 CCC is actually running good for me, so if they improve it anymore then it will run as good as CP.
I also think that many of the people that voted probably just voted for the one they use, whether they really gave the others a chance or not.

OmegaRED

Have you noticed 75% of the fixes on each Ati driver are CCC problems? Honestly I get the feeling ATI is going the norton antivirus route of making an attractive looking application that does everything the CP does but with added cpu/mem usage. That time could be spend on giving us real fixes instead of these phantom performance increases.

The oldschool CP works perfect for me and according to the driver release notes it doesnt require many fixes these days so why cant ATI continue to give us both versions and keep us all happy.

Xophile

When ATI talk about 8.17, does that mean 2008, 3 years in the future? Or am I thinking like a donkey here?

Widkidone

Well this would only encourage people to down load the Omega, Unian, and NGO drivers. SO if you do not like the CCC is would be your way out.

as for the CCC i personally do not like it, because its has alot of issues that needs to be resolved before i would ever use the CCC. Like the shut down hang, eats alot of resource, and few other things.

H3X4D3C1M4L

Yeah but they're not thinking about that...they're thinking in terms of long term integration with Longhorn I believe.


Which would be better for ATI since they'd have a jump on nVidia, presupposing that Longhorn is heavily .NET based

The_Neon_Cowboy

Woot!

8.17 would be like cat 5.9 if i'm thinking right ... aka september

Shadow Lady

well, actually yeah but they use it cauze they feel fine using it right? if not they would search/use other right? so those votes are quite fine anyway

yoda133113

While true, should that mean we should never upgrade if we are happy, cause if so, we wouldn't be using computers or any other modern technology, cause all of that stuff was invented as an improvement, but we felt fine before those things were invented. CCC is the future as far as ATi is concerned, and nVidia will have a .net control panel of their own eventually (if not already, i dunno) and they will have to force the issue eventually, so why not now, if they waited til next year, they would get complaints then.

The_Neon_Cowboy

IMO: To many people dragging thier feet over moveing to CCC and it's not going to change

SecretAgentMan

They are probably dragging their feet because the CCC is terrible when compared to the regular CP.

Aligokalppeker

Ati's cooperation with microsoft leads company to such decisions.If you look with care,after this event is happened,Cat. 5.6 is released with fully hardware supported WMV acceleration.If .NET will be embedded to Longhorn kernel(makes .NET run faster,like IE) , and also ati improves CCC softtware , result CCC will be like control panel.

H3X4D3C1M4L

Not to some people.

CP would run even faster I bet.

But to be honest CCC works so well I don't see why people would get mad

The_Neon_Cowboy

That a matter of openion, I like CCC it far better then that old classic control panel
in my eyes. A good 70 % of people hate .net with a passion wich is the root of why
they don't like it for quite a few.

When you focred to use it you might acually learn like it, actualy give it a chance.
It kinda like that bit of food your parents are trying to get you try try that tases
awesome but you reluntant to try for what ever reason...

H3X4D3C1M4L

Well soon they won't have a choice apparantly....the parents will be using the proverbial brute force method to get the food in

petri1

well perhaps they are so confidetn that they resolved the major issues in CCC as they are so bold and perhaps a bit too daring to skip the ol´good CP so maybe it won´t take up a lot of resources as it does today so if they are to get this to be what they expect then they gotta be like 2000% sure this is the best thing for future cat drivers if not ohh man

Lakevren

CCC for 5.6 is not bad.

I just hate the CLI.exe X 2 running on like 10 megs of my ram each.