ATI CATALYST Driver Examination
Hardware is useless without software to drive it. The ATI CATALYST driver programme, managed by Terry Makedon, exists to provide a set of well designed, WHQL-certified drivers for ATI consumer graphics hardware to allow the consumer to get the most out of their purchase. With a focus on exposing features, usability and modern operating systems hosting the Microsoft .NET software runtime, the CATALYST driver used to evaluate the Radeon X1800 XT first time out is worth a look.You'll likely have seen CATALYST Control Centre before, so we'll limit the shots to the ones that show new X1000-series specific options.
The 3D section in Advanced view will let you turn on the new antialiasing mode, Adaptive Antialiasing, with a simple checkbox. We'll cover that option in more detail in the tech discussion article but suffice to say it offers more image quality by selectively supersampling textures with transparency via alpha. There's a speed cost to pay for enabling it since the hardware is taking more texture samples than it normally would.
The anisotropic filtering options page, a method of increasing detail in antialiased textures that we covered in a recent NVIDIA driver exam, shows you the tickbox for rotation invariant anisotropic filtering. Named High Quality AF, the option uses a different algorithm for the texel sampling needed to perform aniso, choosing different texels that are less angle-adaptive than the 'normal' algorithm. There's a performance cost for enabling it, since the hardware samples textures more often. We'll go over that in the tech discussion.
Under the Avivo banner, the Video Adjustments property page let you make quality adjustments to output quality through the hardware's Avivo display engine.
Deinterlacing is where you choose how the hardware processed interlaced video. The new vector adaptive mode we discussed in the Avivo Technical Discussion is available.
And that's pretty much it. CATALYST Control Centre is the preferred method of interacting with the new R5-series SKUs and it worked flawlessly throughout testing the Radeon X1800 XT. Want more screenshots, have a look here, here, here and here.
