ATI's Release Note Claims Examined cont.
On to the gaming side of things now, we can take a look at the improvements listed for the OpenGL portion of the driver, which supposedly yields improvements at low settings in titles such as Doom 3 and Call of Duty. Of course, not many Radeon X800 users are ever going to make use of such settings, but we shall briefly investigate this anyway - We'll be taking a further look at Doom 3 at its regular settings later on. So, first up is Doom 3, at its 'Low' setting - We've tested at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 here:
Although performance in general remains the same, we can see evidence of improvement at 1024x768, which fits in with driver efficiency improvements cited by ATI, as such improvements are most likely to benefit largely CPU-limited situations such as these. Now let's do the same to Call of Duty, using a custom timedemo run with most graphical settings set to low:
The performance improvement here is a definitive one, with a large increase across all resolutions.
