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  • lombric - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link

    It may be interesting to see the evolution in cpu discharge under various video format and in image quality.

    I know that the introduction of AVIVO in recents drivers was very efficient for the X1xx serie but what about the R420? No chance to have similar results?
  • Egglick - Friday, February 24, 2006 - link

    As far as I know, the X1x00 cards are the only ones with AVIVO, or at least the entire feature set.


    So does that mean that a $80 X1300 has better video playback than a X850XT PE?? Yep.
  • pkw111 - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link

    ... but their conclusion is rather boring. True it may be good solid research, but how about some studies that give colorful results, liek comparing the non-offical ATI drivers, such as WarCat, Omega, ngo, etc.
  • Egglick - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link

    I think it's a little too early to make guesses about the R5xx series right now. Don't forget that both the X800Pro and the 9700Pro are R300 based, and what we're looking at is a cumulation of 3+ years of tweaking and optimizing. The R580 has been out for what, a month?

    We could still see very radical performance boosts for R5xx based cards, particularly the R580 with it's unique shader architecture. It's also possible that performance boosts in new games will be even larger once the successive driver has been optimized for it. Basically, it's a whole new architecture, and what may have been true for both of these R300 based cards may not be true at all for R5xx.

    Also, the CCC is garbage. Boo to ATI for forcing us to use it.
  • DieBoer - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link

    I just wish ati would stop wasting time on optimising 3dmark and start with games. No serious gamer would take notice at all at 3dm scores only the average joe.
  • Spoelie - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link

    The most horrifying thing about CCC is the horrendous memory usage. I had been using the normal control panel all this time but recently formatted and downloaded the latest drivers. WindowsXP's memory usage after bootup went from ~70 something (not much had been installed yet) to a full fledged 200mb!! Only from installing the f*cked up driver.

    After some tweaking (disabling all ATi's added services and the CCC entry in the registry's startup) I'm back at around ~95mb after startup, which I was at before the format.

    Still find it incredible in what kind of default configuration the CCC 'ships'.
  • Questar - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link

    Your saw rhings that weren't there - XP's footprint is much larger than 70MB.
  • Spoelie - Friday, February 24, 2006 - link

    Not really, once you start tweaking and don't have all programs installed, around 70 is really not that much of a stretch without programs open. Even so, even if the task manager for some reason is lying about the absolute numbers, there was a difference of 130mb just by installing a driver.
  • abhaxus - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    i find it surprising that you did not run the test with a dual core CPU to see if the dual core optimizations actually did anything in the new drivers. i know there was a writeup on them awhile back with the 5.12s i believe but i'd like to see if newer versions got any further improvement.
  • SonicIce - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    You can create a short 300 frame timedemo for Farcry and play it back with the http://www.hardwareoc.hu/index.php/p/download/st/....">Farcry bench tool in screenshot mode. This will give you perfectly consistant results. I did it once to compare the shadows on the weapon.
  • breethon - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    I never download the "FULL" package drivers from ATI. I always use the option "dial up - driver only"(the first of three options under the dial up links). I use atitool for any tweaking. I don't have the CCC (atleast I don't believe I do). Don't let the dial-up words trick you. I pull from ati.com just as fast as the broadband links. Hopefully this helps.
  • archcommus - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    I'll admit the CCC takes a long time to load and is bloated, but if you disable it from startup and don't mess with the settings much, it's really not that bad.
  • microAmp - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    If you search the Far Cry forums, there is a way to do a quick save, through the console, IIRC.
  • archcommus - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    Yes, I wouldn't even bother playing the game without doing that, don't care for repeating things endlessly.
  • wing0 - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    from all the comparison for 9700Pro, it seems to me that I should stick with my 5.7 cat?
  • Cybercat - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    I do see a change in the shadows under the dock. I don't know if you could say it's better or worse though.
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    That's actually fog. We couldn't get an exactly perfect screenshot because of the rolling fog(though we kept the scene because it does a good job showing everything), so there is a slight difference due to that. There are no differences however due to driver IQ changes.
  • tfranzese - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    But is the CCC the cause of the increased boot time or is it the .NET Framework in general? I've never given CCC any use personally, just want to be sure that the distinction was made when you took the measurements.
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    It was the CCC, the machine already had the .NET framework on it.
  • Scrogneugneu - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    Yeah, but is the slowdown caused by the CCC itself, or by the .NET components loading because there was a .NET application launched?


    I believe the Framework won't load itself until one application requires it. If the CCC happens to be that application, then there's not much ATI can do about it. However, if it isn't... then they should definitively take a look at that (I'd rater have a better CCC than a "half-a-fps" faster driver).
  • mino - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link

    What they can do is provide Control panel.

    Had they provided CP at least once a quarter, many customers would be happier and it would not require so much resources after all.

    As a result of CCC being the only option, we have decided to abandon all planned purchases of X1000 based graphics cards recently.
    The slowness is not the only issue, we've had also problems to meke CCC run at all(it is needed for multi-display configs).
  • MrJim - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    Hopefully ATI will come to their senses about CCC, as its now it isnt working for the demanding users at all. Average joe maybe dont know you can replace CCC with ati tray tools to help speed up things and thats sad. Please bring back the old control panel, please?
  • Lonyo - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2701...">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2701...
    The "mouseover" comparison at the bottom has one 3D Mark shot, and one HL2 shot.
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link

    Fixed, thanks.

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