Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed

3dMark 2003

3dMark is not a benchmark that we routinely bring you here at AnandTech, as our editorial policy is to bring you benchmarks from real-world games and engines, and not synthetic metrics. That said, it would be inappropriate to leave out 3dMark in this case due to the significant cheating incidents with it. And, as a flashy, system draining benchmark backed by a unique database for comparisons, it's still an important title in the eyes of many consumers, OEMs, and the GPU makers looking for bragging rights.

With 3dMark, its importance in this regression is not so much the performance improvements as a sign of what happened with the card - the improvements were most certainly exaggerated due to in part by the synthetic nature of the benchmark - but rather a possibility of what can happen when ATI dedicates its resources to a game/benchmark that it considers most important. We should note that ATI has admitted to "cheating" on 3dMark 2003; however, these were what we consider honest shader-replacement optimizations (same mathematical output) that ATI voluntarily removed, though they were apparently re-introduced at some point. We used the latest version of 3dMark 2003, so this "cheat" was not activated in the older drivers.

For these benchmarks, 3dMark was run at its default resolution of 1024x768.

With 3dMark, we are starting to see a very common theme, which we have seen with most of our other benchmarks that worked with the Catalyst 3.00 drivers; there's a very significant performance improvement between them and 3.04 when AA/AF are used. Otherwise, 3dMark shows a very slow, very steady performance improvement over the life of the 9700 Pro both with and without AA/AF.

Catalyst 5.11 versus 3.00 (mouse over to see 3.00)

As far as IQ goes, however, we may as well have just shown you the same screenshot twice - there is no difference between the 3.00 and 5.11 drivers. It's the same story for all of the other screenshots in between. It should be noted, however, that this IQ comparison highlights one of the flaws with 3dMark - its non-interactive nature means that certain cheats can be used based on the fact that all perspectives are known ahead of time. So, while we have no reason to believe that ATI is being dishonest here, we have no way of being completely sure that they aren't using any sort of perspective cheating.

Overall then, 3dMark is much like Halo, a benchmark that received a slow, but steady improvement, without any fixes.