ATI's New Graphics Card Control Panel
While speaking to ATI, I also had the chance to ask about ACE, ATI's new control panel for the Radeon series of graphics cards.Weighing in currently at a lardy 60MB, the new control panel is built in .NET using DirectX Graphics to allow realtime preview of applied card settings, so you can see immediately what effect your new settings have on the image quality in your games.
The 60MB or so is comprised of a .NET runtime redistributable package and the driver itself. To minimise the impact of such large downloads, ATI are keen to implement new dynamic updates in the driver, to save only updating assets that have changed.
The bulk of the new driver is art and geometry data for the realtime preview of the racing car scene that's used to show you the settings you've applied, so once you've got the initial download of the new driver, subsequent updates should be small, since the assets for the car won't change and don't need to be redownloaded again.
Current plans are for the control panel to make an appearance in September, probably along with 4.10.
