Page 7 - Drivers

Drivers & performance
We will be testing the card with Catalyst revision 3.7 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.

When you install the control panel you'll notice this nice tab. If you have stability issues you could try out AGP4x or disabling Fast Writes.

DirectX settings.

Open GL settings.

Cheats and Optimizations

A very nasty trend we have seen the past months is that certain, if not most graphics chipset designers, have been caught optimizing and even cheating their drivers for specific benchmarks. We want to explain a few things about the difference between the two and what Guru3d.com has been doing to prevent this grey area of cheating.

An Optimization by itself is honestly nothing bad. Take a racing car. At default it will race at a certain speed, now if we tune it, revise it and hey even switch on that Nitro button, the performance of that racing car will increase heaps. Your Operating system has been optimized for your Pentium or AMD processor to take full advantage of the CPU, the result is a faster computer.

Now we look at the graphics chipset, the two examples named above are similar for graphic processors. Games can be optimized for the graphics chipset to take advantage image quality or performance wise the frame rate. We make a very important side note though, an optimization can not and may not be made at the cost of image quality as that would be cheating.

Cheating, by definition is wrong on all levels. NVIDIA has been caught red-handed clipping in specific synthetic benchmarks. A downright shameful act ...

After huge criticism from the public, NVIDIA has made steps to remove their cheating actions from their drivers which we highly recommend them to do as otherwise it would cost them their reputation and good name at consumer level. If a consumer does and can not trust a product they will not buy it. It's that simple.

NVIDIA's products, however, are far from bad, in fact I still believe the FX line-up is a very good series yet being caught cheating clouded a very negative spiral/reputation around their product line-up and I predict that their cheats have inflicted serious damage in sales of the entire Geforce FX series.

That being said, it's reasonable easy to divert specific cheats and unprofessional optimizations. First things first, we stepped away from synthetic benchmarks. 3D Mark 03 for example, the end-result .. what exactly does that tell you ? Precisely, a number that says basically nothing anymore. 3D mark 03 was heavily 'abused'.

In today's review we will use six benchmarks based on games.

For four of these games we are making use of a custom time demo. Not NVIDIA or either 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.

The downside, a manufacturer can make game-engine specific cheats that lower image quality so it's not 100% fool-proof. There is one piece of software that we know of who has this issue Unreal Tournament 2003 as it does not allow to be rendered at Trilinear filtering while ATI's products do and although with the naked eye you could not tell the difference it most definitely is a bad trend.

As you can see 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.

That being said, let's get started with the benchmarks.