8 replies to this topic

[DarkShadow]

My God... read these 2 articles from INQ

ATI'S CATALYST team managed to do a great job in the past few quarters. These guys were working hard to improve software support and month by month the team has managed to release a new Catalyst driver. It improves some compatibility and other options with every single revision.

While most of ATI's driver updates are just bug fixes, this time ATI will give you a much needed free performance increase, coming with the new Catalyst 5.6 driver.

ATI will soon introduce its Catalyst 5.6 driver and we have the feeling that this might happen on the seventh of June, we might be wrong about the date, it's not yet specific but you never know.

Once you install this new driver you should see around ten per cent plus performance increase in 3Dmark05, Aquamark 3 and Halo and Tomb Raider: AOD games and benchmarks. ATI did this by using some Z optimisations, removing unseen pixels before running through the pixel shaders. I guess that this is an allowed method and Halo might be running even fifteen per cent faster.

The Chronicles of Riddick will work up to fifteen per cent faster than with the old Catalyst 5.5 drivers and ATI did more efficient storage of vertex data and gained some performance that way too.

Doom 3 will work almost twenty per cent faster than with Catalyst 5.5 as ATI made more efficient use of memory.

Even games such as Call of Duty will benefit from this new driver as the driver team managed to increase the game efficiency resulting in close to ten per cent faster performance.

The game that will benefit the most is Lock on: Modern Air combat where you will be able to see an incredible fifty per cent performance increase just by installing a new 5.6 Catalyst driver.

ATI catalyst AI enables texture compression of the clouds resulting with no visual impact and massive performance impact at the same time. Sounds good to us if it works like described. We know that Nvidia test team will definitely try to find any image quality flaws and problems and scream to the rest of the world if it found any difference. We would do it too so let's hope that all is correct here.

The new Catalyst comes in just a few days, it's free and I recommend you get it, if you have an ATI card, and enjoy it. �


______________________________________________________


TWO CHAPS WITH strong arguments managed to persuade DFI to let them benchmark one of the Crossfire motherboards, the DFI RD482. Hard info was hard enough to do so and it manages to include guys from tweaktown into this risky operation. We are not sure what methods where included to get to the goal.

You have to bear in mind that those chaps manage to benchmark demo motherboard with first bogus drivers based on Catalyst 5.4 and that things are far from optimised. They chose heavily Nvidia tweaked game that goes under the name of Doom 3.

Nevertheless ATI Crossfire with two X850XT cards was faster than two Geforce 6800 Ultra or two GT cards, auch Nvidia auch auch.

Nvidia slept in bed with John Carmack for ages and even made a NV30 as the chap requested and still managed to lose from its red competitor. It would like just like seeing ATI losing in Half Life 2, the game it cost them almost six million dollars. It might happen you never know. I have to remind you that new Catalyst 5.6 drivers might improve those numbers even more as much as ten percent as we yesterday wrote here.

ATI is faster or tight in every single setting and I can expect that difference could be even bigger in biased games such as Half Life 2.

Crossfire looks good. All we want to see is how much is going to take the companies to pump it to the hungry market. You can get the scores here.

[Kass]

crazy

[Mr.Big]

WOOHOO!!!!!!!!!1 Good thing I have an ATI :) lol.

[i_smoke_crayons]

<------------ Note the avatar

[kidcapri]

damn that sucks i went with nvidia. Got the 6800 gt.

[DarkShadow]

DESPITE WHAT people were claiming, the G70 will score better than the 7800. The card never got the 7800 suffix based on its 3Dmark05 score and if it was number would end up significantly bigger. It's actually going to be quite better but still not as good as the "Fudo" R520.

We got some numbers from this card and it turns out that R520 scores more than 10000 in 3Dmark05. We still don't know its clock speeds but we know the score. For what we know Nvidia can not mach this with G70.

This is actually even better or equal to two 6800 Ultra cards in SLI which kinds of makes it looks ridiculously fast. Imagine R520 in Crossfire, what ATI "cool chap" described as "Coolest technology ever" could do? Just double the number please.

No question that R520, Fudo will be fast the only questions remains are when is it going to be out and when it will actually be available. We will hopefully found out more soon. �

[keira]

....and what the street price will be once these are out. Once they hit the market, only a few will be available. Demand will be higher than supply so expect to pay a hefty price, say 800 spankings.

[misterweels]

the new omega drivers supposed to be better www.omegadrivers.net im using new ati right now i got much better score on 3d mark 05 2305 its not tat good of score compared to shadow or someone who has fast pc but its alrite

[tury]

Good news on the ATI SLi front, I wondered if they were gonna make a solution soon, even though the x850 still pwns 2 6800s in some tests.

The 5.6 Cats are no where near as good as they have made out, i'm a 9800pro user, and noticed no difference, really. An independent review at guru3d.com said they only made a 0.1fps difference at most in some of the tests they conducted, of which Half Life 2 was one.