Thoughts
Typically speaking hardware enthusiasts, and video card enthusiasts in particular, have a hard time leaving their drivers alone, and thus spend much of their time swapping driver sets and religiously installing every new driver set regardless of necessity. Those of you less zealous about your hardware however will no doubt want to see some evidence before upgrading your video card driver, asking "What's in it for me?". Hopefully this article may have helped to answer at least some of your questions on this front.
As far as CATALYST 4.12 goes, the big news here is probably for those
of you still playing Half-Life 2 in some shape or form, as this driver
has certainly rolled out another set of fine performance improvements.
Generally speaking, this driver set seems to be a stable and fast one,
with most applications finding some benefit performance-wise, however
small. The really big leaps can be seen for anyone still running
CATALYST 4.10 or driver sets previous to that, as basically every test
in our suite showed some big gains moving between 4.10 and 4.12.
If you are one of these people, and particularly if you are an X800 card
owner, you might want to think about making your way over to
ATI.com right now...
HEXUS right2reply:
Taking advantage of the HEXUS Right2Reply initiative, Terry Makedon, ATI Technologies' Senior Product Manager – Software, comments:
It's great to see an influential site like HEXUS taking an interest in CATALYST software developments.
We hope that this becomes a regular feature for you!
After reading the article in detail, I can tell you that all of the small batch gains we observed in 3DMark05 were measured on Intel P4 platforms whereas you are using a specific AMD rig for your test.
Driver updates will not always show the same performance improvement across multiple platforms.
If HEXUS Labs have a chance to check the small batch results on a P4, then that would be great.
We went back and verified that the gains were observed on the Pentium 4 systems.
Our testing on AMD systems showed that these gains were indeed limited to Intel CPU's.
Our engineers work all year to make sure we can publish a brand new WHQL-approved driver twelve times a year and your analysis should prove very useful to HEXUS readers who are thinking about upgrading their driver software.
Terry Makedon
Senior Product Manager – Software
ATI Technologies, Inc.
