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Thursday 15 May, 2003

Catalyst Drivers 3.4 - Initial impressions by @ 11:39 pm

Well, Catalyst Maker and his team have sure got a winner here. These are about the fastest, most stable and glitch free drivers I have ever used for any graphics card. I've only had them installed for about half an hour now, but these drivers shine.

I know this is the home of the Geforce FAQ, but when I see quality like I see in the 3.4 Catalyst drivers for ATI graphics cards, I've just got to tell the world.

It would be wrong of me to call this news report a benchmark report as I've only had these drivers installed for half an hour or so, but already running the few tests I've run with 3DMark 03 my score has jumped a massive 350 marks or so.

Lets start from the beginning. ATI have released the new Catalyst 3.4 drivers for all ATI Radeon cards. Head on over to the ATI website to grab these and the other elements that make up the ATI Catalyst 3.4 suite. Or XP users can get the just drivers direct from this address:

Catalyst Driver 3.4 Control Panel
ATI Catalyst Driver 3.4

After uninstalling the 3.2s, I loaded up the new 3.4s. A quick check of the control panel tells me I have the new 3.4s installed.

ATI Catalyst 3.4 Control Panel

The next big difference with these new Catalyst is that you get a new colour control panel to adjust the colours within 3d applications. A nice touch and very welcome.

New ATI Colour Control Panel

The first thing I wanted to do was check to see if I had any speed improvement with 3DMark 03. I ran the benchmark program at default settings without any filtering. Knowing my score with the 3.2 drivers at this setting was 4353 I was delighted with the final result of 4666. That's over a 300 point improvement.

Default 3DMark 03 benchmark score

Next was a quick test of some of my demoscene demos. I knew I had a few problems with some of my demos which I keep in a special folder marked dud demos. One of these is a demo by Yodel called '32 degrees'. It ran fine under 3.2 but I had blotches of colour that were in places they shouldn't be. But with the 3.4 Catalyst drivers the demo ran flawlessly.

The other thing I noticed while testing out my demos was that I didn't notice any stuttering. With a few of my DirectX demos, when a 3D object was close up it would jump/stutter from left to right rather than smoothly move across the screen. I didn't notice this happening.

Knowing that one of my favourite games 'Microsoft's Train Simulator' suffered badly from this effect when the outside view 4 was set, I was eager to see if these new drivers had made any improvement. Well, I gotta say the train now passes without the slightest hint of a stutter. I'm very pleased.

To sum up, I have only touch the surface of the improvements I have found with these drivers. I am sure after alot more deep testing they are going to continue to surprise me. I'm sure that my graphic images look clearer, I can see that these drivers are smoother and 3DMark proves they are faster. So far, everything I have tried and tested with these drivers show an improvement. If ever you could get close to perfection, these new Catalyst drivers is it.

It goes to show that ATI's idea of getting dedicated members of the public to beta test drivers and to work alongside Catalyst Maker and his team has paid off. These are the peoples drivers. Made with what people have asked for in a driver. I take my hat off to all of them. I'm one happy caretaker;-)

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