Page 5 - Drivers
DriversWe will be testing the card with Catalyst revision 3.8 which are fast and stable to use. Highly recommended drivers. By the way, you can grab them from our file-section.
The drivers look and feel just like the previous Catalyst driver releases which you are used to, however, with two changes that are Radeon 9x00 specific. The first one is the quality/performance anti aliasing settings, you can choose 2X, 4X or 6X multi-sampled AA modes from the control panel.
The other change that we noticed is the new performance/quality options for anisotropic filtering up to 16x. Here's an overview of driver properties.
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Benchmark Software Suite:
* For four of these games we are making use of a custom time demo. Neither NVIDIA nor ATI knows what time demo we are using. These are non-public tests which where recorded for us only. We are not going to make them public either as they are and will remain internal material. Therefore the chipset manufacturer will not have the chance of optimizing it that specific benchmark time-demo. We will do our very best now and in the future to keep a close eye on optimizations and cheats, we need to be able to show you objective results. However in the end this should be a responsibility for the chipset designer, if that entity fails to do so, then it'll lose consumer's trust and will dig it's own grave. |
All tests were made in 32 bit colors in resolutions ranging from 800x600 pixels up-to the Godfather of all gaming resolutions, the 1600x1200 several performance/quality settings.
You will not see any results on overclocking as the graphics core is locked. At default you can not overclock these drivers. With a tool like our RivaTuner you can hack the drivers if you want to. Or even grab an unlocked BIOS on the internet. I did not have the time to do so.
Watching Movies or media filesWithin any Radeon chip to date, the video immersion engine provides integrated iDCT and Motion Compensation together with adaptive de-interlacing for really good DVD and video quality.
All Radeon products provide both hardware motion compensation and iDCT for the highest performance DVD/video playback. With the hardware DVD playback capabilities of the Radeon, the user will receive high performance and quality while maintaining a low CPU utilization. ATI's Video Immersion technology integrates digital video features, including advanced adaptive de-interlacing algorithms for high video quality.
Hannibal Lecter, everybody loves this movie.
Kylie Minogue, everybody loves her .. well you fill in the rest.
ATi's media playback simply is awesome. Look at the image below taken with an 9800XT but looks and works the same on this graphics card, JPEG compression makes them a tad fuzzy though, that's not an ATI's issue.
