We've
shown you around ATi's new Catalyst driver suite
recently but wanted to give you a quick refresh on all that
they have to offer. Where ATi has historically had an
Achilles' Heel with respect to driver stability and
optimizations, they have come full circle this year and now
have functionality and stability that rivals any offering on
the market.
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Radeon
9700 Pro and Catalyst Drivers |
Stability and great
functionality |
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There are a multitude of control
panels within the Catalyst driver version 7.75 that we
tested the Radeon 9700 Pro with.
Anisotropic Filtering up to 16X
(64 tap), 6X AA, Mip Map and Texture detail are all
available for tweaking to your hearts content.
Actually, these drivers offer Anisotropic filtering
adjustments in Direct 3D which are not an option in NVIDIA's
Detonator driver suite. You also get the standard
issue gamma adjustments, display preferences and video
overlay settings. We did notice one small glitch with
the board however, at least in our WinXP setup. The
card seemed somewhat sluggish at redrawing menus when moving
through the WinXP interface. We're not sure if this
was a driver issue or what and are researching the problem
with ATi.
Let's have a look at what sort
of 3D image quality the Radeon 9700 Pro can deliver and fire
up its SmoothVision AA engine with a couple game titles for
comparison.
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Comanche 4 and Jedi Knight II AA Tests |
4X AA versus 16X FAA
versus 6X Gamma Corrected Radeon 9700 AA |
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We've taken screen shots from Novalogic's Comanche 4 and
Jedi Knight II. We'll compare various AA settings for
you here versus 4X AA on the NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4600 and
16XFAA on the Matrox Parhelia. Our aim in this test is
to enable each card's best AA quality for comparison,
regardless of frame rate. We'll get back to the frame
rate side of things later.
Reference No AA
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Reference No AA
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GeForce 4 4X AA
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GeForce 4 4X AA
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Parhelia
16X FAA
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Parhelia 16X FAA
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R9700 4X AA
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R9700 4XAA
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R9700 6X AA
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R9700 6X AA
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Here are a few observations we've made here. In the
Parhelia 16X FAA shots the rotor blades on the chopper are
literally untouched by the AA engine it seems. They
look very jagged when compared to any of the other AA shots
in this test. Then we get to the 4X AA shots.
For sure they look very clean with crisp lines on the
copter, edges of the tents and the flagpole is nearly
perfect. However, take a look at the 6X AA shots on
the Radeon 9700. There is not an edge anywhere in
these shots, that does not look perfectly crisp. This
was to be expected of course with a 6X AA sampling method
and gamma correction on sampled pixels of the Radeon 9700
shots. Let's have a look at an image we used in our
Parhelia review, which really told the story well.
Reference No AA
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GeForce 4 4X AA
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Parhelia 16X FAA
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R9700 6X AA
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Again, what we are showcasing here is the
maximum AA setting for each card compared. As you can
see the Parhelia shot is definitely better looking AA than
the 4X GeForce 4 shot. However, we would also offer
that the 6X AA Radeon 9700 shot is nearly pixel perfect and
slightly better than the Parhelia generated image. As
always, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so you be the
judge.
Did someone say benchmarks? Yeah... we
have a few of those.
Benchmarks and real numbers! |