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Drivers have always been considered the weak point of ATI's multimedia and graphics solutions in comparison to the unified driver architecture of NVIDIA's solutions ever since the launch of the Radeon series. This however is thankfully no longer the case. Some months ago, ATI launched their unified driver suite under the title of Catalyst, which initially upon introduction supplied improved performance and stability across the product range, although maintaining a minimal amount of game or application specific issues.
Things have come a long way since the initial introduction of the Catalyst suite, and thankfully I can safely say that ATI's latest Catalyst Releases are solid performance and stability wise from what I have seen and carry a much improved user-friendly wise control panel.
The driver CD ATI supplied with the All-In-Wonder 9000 Pro came with Catalyst version 2.4, and the installation was completely issue free, and completely automated.
The Direct3D/OpenGL panels host all the typical settings such as ATI's SMOOTHVISION (Anti-Aliasing), Anisotropic Filtering, V-Sync, Texture Detail preference, MipMap Detail level, which user variable. You can either set these options custom to your on preference, or select a level range from 1-5, relating to performance vs. quality, and the most appropriate settings will automatically be selected.
One intuitive addition to these pages is that as you continue to increase the level of Anti-Aliasing, from 2x to 4x for instance, the driver page displays the maximum resolution available under your chosen settings. Although nothing groundbreaking, it does show ATI are working hard at making things as user-friendly as possible.
The SmartGart page is somewhat select explanatory, and basically automatically detects the current AGP Transfer speed and Fast Write settings and allows the user a minimal amount of control over these functions via the driver.
The display and overlay page are intended for use with a system configured for multiple simultaneous displays, such a two monitors as is ATI's HydraVision Utility.
Unfortunately at time of review, I didn't have the chance to test the multiple display technology of this particular card, although previous experience with a HydraVision enabled card has was pleasing. I would assume the HydraVision technology is identical between different members of the Radeon Family, if so you can expect an excellent.
2D quality, a now somewhat overshadowed attribute, for the record, was superb. I personally like to play a lot with animation and modelling software, and was pleased to see that the 2d Image quality was excellent with clear and crisp text at the highest of resolutions, something that has become somewhat of a trademark for ATI cards over the years.
So, after looking at the multimedia aspects of the card, both hardware and software, lets move onto see how the aforementioned changes to the architecture affect the 3d performance of the core in reality with some benchmarks.
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