ATI's Catalyst 3.8 Drivers: ATI Sanctioned Overclocking
by Derek Wilson on October 8, 2003 3:02 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
In light of our final testing, it is very important to mention that we did not shut down the system and let the card cool down between each test. It is therefore possible that we didn't see the highest potential performance gains we could have from each game. Ideally we would have done this, but we've only had these drivers for a day, and we didn't know the extent to which continued use would affect the cards performance. Of course, this isn't all bad.
The fact that this card overclocks itself based on temperature allows at lot of room for differentiation between different R360 based products. The type of cooling card makers decide to strap on these chips will directly affect how much performance a user can get out of the overdrive feature. Since this doesn't involve doing things like tweaking core and memory clock speeds at the OEM side, more manufacturers can offer cards that have the performance of overclocking with the rock solid stability ATI’s overdrive feature offers. All that's necessary for more consistent performance gains is a better cooling solution.
Of course, we don't know how intensive cooling will affect maximum performance as we don't know the upper limit of ATI’s automatic clock settings.
Overall, these drivers offer some very good UI enhancements, and the overdrive feature does provide tangible speed improvements, and hopefully their VPU Recovery feature will save some people the trouble of blindly rebooting their systems when they lose video. Unfortunately, we didn't see the image quality fixes for TRAOD and Neverwinter Nights that we wanted. Hopefully ATI will not stand by and hope enough people think NVIDIA’s image quality is poor enough that the issue with their own product can go ignored.
Of course, the speed gains from this driver release are not astronomical, but when we add these small gains to the gains already seen in the 9800XT, we can definitely say that this is a solid, well rounded, fall refresh product from ATI. We applaud ATI for trying to go in new directions to enhance performance, and we hope to see plenty of cards from their partners that take advantage of the opportunity presented to them by the XT line. Even so, we are still standing behind our wait and see recommendation with respect to purchasing a card intended for use with the coming DX9 games.
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Anonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
so... 50 and 51 ... do you play your games for 10 minutes, then turn off the computer to let it cool down so you can get better fps? hell no. you play and play and play till yer done.doing all these benchmarks without letting the card cool down (whether it shows the 3.8 full potential or not) is more like what users will experience on their systems. That makes this data more useful to me than anything else they could have done.
crazy ati fanbois
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
I'm with 50. He is right.Anonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
trying to test a temp related mod without controlling temp in the case is just assinine. This proves absolutely nothing. They themselves said they did not allow cooling between tests so they don't know how the overdrive was working. I would be more impressed with just the change in speed numbers than the fps. That would at least tell us whether the overclocking was used throughout the test and not shut off after the card got hot on the 2nd benchmark. The test had no control basis and therefore all the data is trash.Anonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
when the 9600 XT is going to be realased, i'm waiting for itAnonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
In your discussion of image quality, I don't seea comment on HALO. Yet on my PC (P4C 2.8,
Radeon 9800 PRO, Catalyst 3.6) I get clear drawing
errors. Looking at the sky in any outdoor scene in
level 5 or 8, it shows just a gaping hole which
should've been obscured by fog. More subjectively,
the fog in the swamps at the start/end of level 6
also doesn't work as well as on the XBOX.
What are the experiences of people with different
hardware/drivers?
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
I dont see the overdrive tab, is this only visible with 9800pro etc.My card is a 9500pro!!
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
... so they will only allow the Mhz, where every card works?Anonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
maybe we are gonna see unofficial moded versions of these drivers, with the overclocking limit removed :d . ATI just cant allow this difference between the users cards, when one has a "overclocker" card and gets his 10% and the other has something "allergic to speed" card lol and gets nothing. ATI just cant make the speed of the card luckAnonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
I'm disappointed that Anand didn't try to find out why overdrive didn't produce better figures.Overdrive might not overclock as much as some people want, but it should still give more impact than just 0,5fps.
Since the 9800XT is mainly an overclocked 9800Pro we should be able to accurately estimate the impact of overdrive on the 9800XT.
I suspect that we would get far better numbers if Anand had used 1024*768 instead of 1600*1200 4xAA.
Afaik overdrive only overclocks the GPU and not the memory. At 1600*1200 you are more likely to run into a memory bandwith limited situation. (Especially with all those DX8 games)
In such a situation it is logical that overdrive won't give any large increase in fps.
The other explanation is that the air termperatuur in the computer case Anand uses was very high and therefor overdrive was not able to overclock much.
In either case it is a shame that Anandtech didn't do anything at all to discover where the disappointing results came from.
(I hope nobody here actually thinks that ATI would go through the trouble of creating overdrive when it would only gain 0,5 fps)
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 9, 2003 - link
this is getting way too geeky... Anand, you are indeed the master geek. I mean in this in a good way... or am I? hahaha hust kidding. You guys sure have a lot of patience. Incredible!