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In the past when
we would see the words "ATi" and "drivers" used in the same
sentence, it usually was not positive. What once was a
major thorn in the side of ATi and the people that used
their products, has now come full circle. Back in June
of 2002 ATi unveiled the revamped driver package dubbed
"Catalyst" which boasted a new interface, wider range if
features and most of all...stability. Now a year has
passed and the Catalyst drivers have gone through an
aggressive update cycle proving that ATi is taking things
very seriously.
  
The two parts of
the Catalysts that most users will be concerned with are the
OpenGL and Direct3D tabs. Each tab offers individual
setting for various visual qualities. A simple slider
can automatically adjust the majority of settings to cater
the visuals from performance to quality and anywhere in
between. If preferred, manual settings are available
to adjust Anisotropic Filtering, Smoothvision
(Anti-Aliasing), Texture performance, Mipmap Level and
Truform. The SmartGart tab offers options to adjust
the AGP speed setting from 0X to 4X and allows for toggling
of Fast Writes. While most users will probably never
need to touch these setting, they can come in handy when
issues arise with a game that has stability issues.
Next we're going
to hit the benchmarks and see how the All-In-Wonder Radeon
9000 Pro performed when we threw some OpenGL and DirectX
based tests at it.
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HotHardware Test Systems |
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nForce2 and AMD Test Bed |
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ATI All-in-Wonder 9000 Pro
Catalyst Driver 3.2
MSI
GeForce FX5200
Detonator 43.45
AMD AthlonXP 2100+
Asus A7N8X Deluxe
512MB PC2700 RDRAM
Western Digital 30GB
ATA-100 7200RPM Hard Drive
Creative 52X C-DROM
Windows XP Pro SP-1
DirectX 9.0a
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Methodology:
We chose to test the All-In-Wonder Radeon 9000 Pro on
the
Asus A7N8X Deluxe
with an
Athlon XP 2100+.
The first thing we did when configuring this system was
enter the BIOS and "Load Optimized Defaults". We
then configured the Memory CAS Latency and other memory
timings to be set by the SPD. The hard drive was
formatted, and Windows XP Professional w/ SP1 was
installed. After the Windows installation was complete,
we installed the nForce chipset drivers and then hit the
Windows Update site. We downloaded all of the
available updates, with the exception of the ones
related to Windows Messenger. Then we installed all of
the necessary drivers for the rest of our components,
disabling and removing Windows Messenger.
Auto-Updating and System Restore was also disabled, and
we set up a 768MB permanent page file. Lastly, we
set Windows XPs Visual Effects to "best performance",
installed all of the benchmarking software, defragged
the hard drive and ran all of the tests at the CPU's
default clock speed. For comparison, the scores of
the ATi All-Wonder-Radeon 9000 Pro were compared to
those of a GeforceFX 5200. |
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Overclocking |
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Let's See Just How "Wonderful" it is... |
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While the All In
Wonder is not a high performance video card per se, it does
offer a fair amount of muscle to play most of today's games
with decent results. This would seem to be all the
more reason to see what kind of overclocking potential the
card has, exposing any untapped potential. To get
started, we downloaded and installed the latest copy of
Powerstrip and began accessing the GPU and Memory speeds.
Starting out at at the default 275MHz core and 270MHz of DDR
SDRAM (540MHz DDR), we managed to hit a top speed of 320MHz
for both GPU and Memory. This was a decent gain that
released an additional 16% of video processing power across
the board. In the pages ahead we'll include some
overclocking results to demonstrate some of the added gains
that can be had by overclocking the All-In-Wonder Radeon
9000 Pro.
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Starting Things Off with 3DMark2001SE(330) |
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Direct X Benchmarking |
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Typically we
like to get the Direct X tests started with a round of
3DMark 2001SE. In this round we ran the test at two
common resolutions comparing the results to a GeForce
FX5200. As promised, we also ran the benchmark while
overclocking the card to see what gains could be found.
At the common
1024x768 resolution, the Radeon 9000 Pro put up a
respectable 7782 3DMarks, beating the FX5200 by a little
over 300 points. Once we overclocked the card to
320MHz core and 320MHz memory (640MHz DDR), we managed to
tack on an additional 649 points, peaking at 8431.
At 1280x1024,
the All In Wonder did slip a bit, dropping 1611 points
versus the previous test. What was most impressive was
not only did the 9000 Pro card keep a sizable lead versus
the FX5200, when we cranked up the MHz, we managed to
increase the score close to 20%.
Overall, the
All-In-Wonder Radeon 9000 Pro held tough against the FX5200
even though it had half the amount of RAM and only AGP 4X.
On the next page we'll continue the DirectX testing with
another Hot Hardware favorite, Unreal Tournament 2003.
UT2003 DirectX Testing and Some OpenGL |