HiS Excalibur Radeon 9600XT Turbo review

Graphics cards 1049 Page 5 of 15 Published by

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Page 5 - Drivers and media playback

Drivers
We will be testing the card with Catalyst revision 3.9 which are fast and stable to use and the recommended drivers. By the way, you can grab them from our file-section where the new Catalyst 4.1 drivers also can be found.

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.

ATI's Catalyst Driver suite
Open GL Settings 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.
Your standard set of options Here's a new tab also. VPU recover. When the display adapter does not receive commands from the driver it'll reset and try to continue. Thus if you graphics card hangs it'll reset without the need to restart (theoretically). Call of Duty proved otherwise.
This is the new 3D properties tab. You can quickly see your choice in quality settings and then if needed alter them. This is the Direct3D SmoothVision tab, you can alter Anisotropic filtering and AA for example.
This is the new  Smartshader effects for Direct3D, completely useless.  

You can click on the images to enlarge them

Watching Movies or media files
Within 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.

PDVD_025.jpg
Hannibal Lecter, everybody loves this movie.

PDVD_030.jpg
Kylie Minogue, everybody loves her .. well you fill in the rest.

ATi's media playback simply is awesome. The images are actually taken with an 9800XT and not this graphics card it but looks and works the same on any Radeon 9x00 model, JPEG compression makes them a tad fuzzy though, that's not an ATI's issue.

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