Catalyst 7.4 / Vista + 15-30% in games

[VirusType2]

Well, I'm trying to squeeze every last drop of performance out of my hardware, I just installed new drivers days ago, and there's a new version. Must have come within a few days.

ATI catalyst 7.4

I won't supply a link but you can paste that in your browser to find a place to download.

This is the newer lighter control center of course, in case you haven't used CCC in a while, its much faster loading and uses much less ram.

AMD/ATI have issued a new set of its Catalyst drivers - now version 7.4 - for both Windows XP and Vista.

OpenGL performance under the Microsoft Vista operating system improves for all Radeon X1000 series of products, in both single card and hardware CrossFire configurations. Typical Improvements of 15% or more can be seen in games such as Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey, with enthusiast class of products seeing improvements of 30% or more.

That is a ****ing huge increase for OpenGL apps. ATI is not known for it's speed running OpenGL, so this is great.
Just finished downloading, I'm going to install them now.

 

[Kyorisu]

So OpenGL is actually playable now? I know Frets on Fire lagged it's are off in Vista and that's not a start of the art graphics nazi game.

 

[VirusType2]

Forgive my ignorance, I'm still relatively new to modern PC gaming. I just noticed that ATI drivers are made by AMD.

So ATI is owned by AMD?

Is Nvidia owned by Intel by any chance?


Is there an advantage to going with an ATI GPU if you have an AMD CPU?

Is there an advantage to going with an Nvidia GPU if you have an Intel CPU?

-V

EDIT:

I have been using ATI Tray Tools and ATITool.

I have been using ATITool for overclocking, instead of Control Center's Overdrive.

With this new 7.4 driver, I noticed I don't have the option of using Overdrive anymore. Is that because it detected me using ATI tool to overclock instead? or.. WTF

 

[Kyorisu]

Nvidia owned by Intel, lawl that's hilarious.

No. Further more no.

AMD and ATi merged some time back.

 

[VirusType2]

I did a combination of tweaks, but even on XP, I got like 30% increase in performance on Test Drive:Unlimited

Installed Catalyst 7.4 (was using 7.2) (don't know if this is an improved AV stream driver)
I disabled onboard sound
Enabled External Sound 'card'
I increased my overclock (about 10 mhz GPU and about 10Mhz Video RAM


-No more sound glitches

-Sounds are much clearer (of course)

-No more video glitches

-Higher, smooth Framerate even while setting the game to a higher resolution.


Test Drive Unlimited:

I was able to upgrade the video settings on this game to True HD resolution (had it set to 800x600)

Framerate still improved and smoothed out, even though I set it to a much higher resolution.

It's hard to tell, since I didn't benchmark, and I did some other tweaks, but I would say the new Catalyst driver helped significantly. Just guessing that This game uses OpenGL.

 

[Asus]

ATItools is great. That's what I have installed. Although you can't use Overdrive with it, only with CC I believe. It seems ATI has been doing really good with Vista drivers. When ATI first released their Vista drivers they seemed to offer similar performance to what they had on XP. Yet Nvidia's first Vista drivers performed quite a bit slower than their XP drivers.

AMD bought ATI out like last summer/fall. All GPUs are universal so there is nothing better about combining an ATI card on an AMD system. Although since they merged, AMD is planning to do some cool stuff. (work with GPUs built onto the CPU and also having a slot on the motherboard for a 'co-proccessor' board.

 

[VirusType2]

ATItools is great. That's what I have installed. Although you can't use Overdrive with it, only with CC I believe. It seems ATI has been doing really good with Vista drivers. When ATI first released their Vista drivers they seemed to offer similar performance to what they had on XP. Yet Nvidia's first Vista drivers performed quite a bit slower than their XP drivers.

AMD bought ATI out like last summer/fall. All GPUs are universal so there is nothing better about combining an ATI card on an AMD system. Although since they merged, AMD is planning to do some cool stuff. (work with GPUs built onto the CPU and also having a slot on the motherboard for a 'co-proccessor' board.

Hey dude, since we have the same graphics card, we should do an ati TRAY tool framerate at default clock comparison on the same game. I'm extremely curious to see the performance benefit the rest of your hardware can give me.

We can check a game that is taxing, like half life 2 Lost Coast with bloom + hdr.

Bloom + Hdr doesn't run well on my PC, and it pisses me off, because I thought that was why I bought a ****in ATI card, because it can do both. If it can hardly process both, then don't bother you know? Messing up my gameplay.

let me know if you want to see how bad your PC kills mine. I guess we can take a screenshot of the lost coast, with the same settings, and start a new game and don't move, and take a shot right where the game starts your player. You just have to tick the box next to "display overlays on screenshots" with ati tray tools, and take the shot with tray tools.

 

[3ssence]

ATItools is great. That's what I have installed. Although you can't use Overdrive with it, only with CC I believe.

This is interesting, because i've found ati tools to be absolutely useless for overclocking my X1800XT, but i've found rivatuner to be brilliant !!

Just what kind of gap is there between DX9 performance in XP and Vista now ? As that is one of the things that has put me off buying vista just yet.

 

[VirusType2]

This is interesting, because i've found ati tools to be absolutely useless for overclocking my X1800XT, but i've found rivatuner to be brilliant !!

Just what kind of gap is there between DX9 performance in XP and Vista now ? As that is one of the things that has put me off buying vista just yet.

Why did you think that ATITool was trash? What do you like about Rivatuner?

I just use Ati Tool because it lets me set different fan speeds for different temperatures. I found out that my card's Default configuration is to run 14% VGA fan until the thing is practically on fire before it turns the fan up any higher.


By using CCC overdrive, by the time the fan duty was increased from a meager %14, it was because the card crashed from being to hot. How ****ing stupid.

So I use ATITool, and I have it set to kick up the fan duty as the temperature increases. The crash point (I guess the card resets if it detects that high of a temperature, to keep you from damaging it) seems to be 73 degrees celcius, so I have it set to run 100% fan duty if it ever gets to 70 ish. Even though I am overclocking much higher than I was with CCC, it runs cooler, about 10 or 15 degrees celcius cooler (and the fan duty usually never needs to get more than about 34%)

I'd turn up the frequency even higher but I was seeing little dots (artifacts) on ATITool's artifact tester. I don't know if it's OK to have ANY or to try to keep them minimal. I don't see anything when I play the game, even though some do show up on the tester. I'm scared to let the ATITool automatically detect max settings, because It cranks that bitch way up, way fast, and it crashed the first time I did it. It had my memory up there in the 800's


I really don't know what the hell I'm doing, I read very little on the subject.

Everything I've read made it seem so simple, they were like, "keep card cool, if your card is reseting, you have gone to far, otherwise, keep going." And that is basically the extent of my knowlege. lmfao.



Should I try to match the memory frequency to the GPU frequency in some way? (multiples?) That just occured to me...

I'm also wondering if I should just use 100% VGA fan when I'm playing 3D games? I can tolerate the volume increase, ill just turn up the game volume is the fan going to burn out or something? Why is CCC so stingy in rationing out fan speed? 14%?


Also, am I supposed to increase the voltage .1 pt or something? I haven't

 

[3ssence]

Don't go changing voltages on your graphics card, it's not worth it unless you have some pretty hefty cooling, and is more likely to cause damage than some extra voltage on the cpu is. Just stick with changing the frequencies for now.

Frequency wise, i increase each frequency a little at a time (5-10mhz or so), benchmarking in between to check for artefacts, crashes etc, until i find the maximum value where artefacts do not occur. Then i set the frequencies at 5-10 mhz below those max frequencies and basically stress the card by gaming etc to see if increased heat levels will cause any artefacts or crashes. If not then i game happily on, if so then i reduce the frequencies a little and repeat.

I found that ATI Tool couldn't even apply the same frequencies that i was able to in overdrive without locking the card up, hence my use of Rivatuner, which has been great for me. The ability to set the fan levels for different temp levels is good though.