ATI's Release Note Claims Examined
Every ATI driver is always paired with a set of release notes, listing bug fixes, feature additions and performance improvements. It's the performance side of things we'll be concentrating on today, so let's see what the release notes have to say:- Driver efficiency has improved considerably for both Direct3D and OpenGL
- Numerous D3D games show 2-3% gains at low resolution. The small batch size tests in 3DMark05 show improvements as large as 15% on some products
- In OpenGL, several game titles show improvements in the lower settings. Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory, for instance, shows gains as large as 15% in low resolution (driver-bound) cases. Doom III performance improves 5-10% at low settings. Call of Duty improves 5-6%
- Half-Life 2 performance also improves as much as 20% over Catalyst 4.11 in certain sections of the game
As we can see, a few things to keep us busy here. Let's begin with the only synthetic benchmark listed, in the form of 3DMark05. No driver comparison would be complete without taking a brief look at the score achieved with a default benchmark run for each driver set, so let's take a peek at that first:
We see no real difference here between CATALYST 4.11 and 4.12, but what we can see is an indication of the improvement gained by a fix incorporated into CATALYST 4.11, which allowed AGP Radeon X800 boards to address their full 256MB of video memory correctly, resulting in the 1,000-odd point increase you can see above. Let's now move on to what the release notes discuss, and see how performance looks between our drivers in 3DMark05's batch size tests:
No sign of any improvements for our Radeon X800 between any of the drivers here, if anything CATALYST 4.12 lags behind slightly. It seems safe to say from looking at this that the improvements mentioned in the driver release notes were aimed at another product in ATI's range.
