AMD's ATI Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3 Preview

solofly

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May 25, 2003
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AMD’s ATI Catalyst 10.2 and Catalyst 10.3 are receiving many improvements that directly benefit the gameplay experience. CrossFireX profiling system has been completely re-worked, Bezel Compensation is in play, and several other features have been added. If you are an ATI Eyefinity gamer, Bezel Compensation will take the experience one step further.

http://hardocp.com/article/2010/02/17/amds_ati_catalyst_102_103_preview
 

lavaheadache

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2005
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seems to be the holy grail of driver releases.... hope they can really deliver all this trouble free
 

blanketyblank

Golden Member
Jan 23, 2007
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Nice. A driver release this early in the month is always a good sign unlike 10.1 which was a last minute release. None of the changes make any difference to me, but nice if I ever add another card or monitor.

I wonder if the driver fixes any other issues like for people with 5770 grey screens or flickering. Still seems strange to me that only some people get the problem so maybe a lot of driver fixable defective cards were released. Then again I don't use a second monitor so maybe I do have the problem, but don't know it. Also wonder if it does something with the 2d acceleration problem in Win 7 Toms Hardware mentioned.
 

gorobei

Diamond Member
Jan 7, 2007
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nice. bezel compensation is even better than triplehead2go's implementation. it actually widens the render fustrum rather than just chopping out the occluded area under the bezel and shifting the side monitor images.
 

cbn

Lifer
Mar 27, 2009
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http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3743

Here is the Anandtech article.

It looks like Eyefinity support is improving.

So if someone uses two separate HD5770s or HD5750s I am assuming a Display port to DVI adapter is no longer needed for triple monitor implementation?

One video card would use two dvi outputs and the other card one DVI output right?
 

TXAngel08

Banned
Feb 13, 2010
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Nice to see ATI focusing on drivers for a change...

One of the reasons why I have never used a ATI card for my gaming rig is the overall poor condition of their drivers. Always had better luck with nVidia in that regard. I use ATI cards in my secondary machines, but my two main machines have nVidia because of driver quality.

Just one more reason to wait and see what Fermi brings to the table, however I suspect they will need a few months to get that right as well. :)

(the above does ignore the mess that was nVidia's Vista drivers in 2007-08, but since I skipped Vista, I don't care, on Windows 7 now and very happy)
 

gorobei

Diamond Member
Jan 7, 2007
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bad to assume.
if 5970 was the testbed for CF eyeF, then the only thing you can infer is that they were able to get 2 cores to feed one card's output.
 

cbn

Lifer
Mar 27, 2009
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bad to assume.
if 5970 was the testbed for CF eyeF, then the only thing you can infer is that they were able to get 2 cores to feed one card's output.

Yep, part of me was thinking a person would need to use all the connectors on one card (rather than being able to share connectors between two cards)
 
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Borealis7

Platinum Member
Oct 19, 2006
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with all this investment into EyeFinity, are we going to see borderless LCD screens like TV are getting now? i've looked at the AT screenshot of his EyeFinity setup and i dont think i'll ever play like that since the borders cut the screen which makes it look bad IMO.
 

cbn

Lifer
Mar 27, 2009
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with all this investment into EyeFinity, are we going to see borderless LCD screens like TV are getting now? i've looked at the AT screenshot of his EyeFinity setup and i dont think i'll ever play like that since the borders cut the screen which makes it look bad IMO.

I hope there will be borderless LCDs soon.

In fact, with three 1080p monitors in portrait mode I could easily use my Computer for watching movies/TV from a good distance. Would stretching a single 1080p movie over triple monitors affect image quality excessively? Or would the video card be able to compensate for the different pixel pitch size?
 

Lonyo

Lifer
Aug 10, 2002
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http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3743

Here is the Anandtech article.

It looks like Eyefinity support is improving.

So if someone uses two separate HD5770s or HD5750s I am assuming a Display port to DVI adapter is no longer needed for triple monitor implementation?

One video card would use two dvi outputs and the other card one DVI output right?

That's a very good point, and might make dual HD57xx more appealing than a single HD58xx for more than performance reasons.
If you can get Eyefinity without a DP adapter and also better performance, then it's even more value for the lower end Crossfire setup.
 

nyker96

Diamond Member
Apr 19, 2005
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I only got a 4850 so many improvements don't seem to apply to my card, probably more useful update for the newer 5xxx.
 

Dorkenstein

Diamond Member
Jul 23, 2004
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It looks like unless you have Crossfire or Eyefinity, the new drivers won't change anything for you.
 

Lonyo

Lifer
Aug 10, 2002
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It looks like unless you have Crossfire or Eyefinity, the new drivers won't change anything for you.

Or if you have a mobile card (for the 10.3's).
Plus these are feature lists, not entire lists, I'm sure they will have done work in terms of games etc as well, but what else can you expect anyway from driver releases apart from improving new features?
What which isn't covered could they do for other cards?
 

VashHT

Diamond Member
Feb 1, 2007
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I hope this fixes the large mouse cursor, mine came back after installing 10.1.
 

Imp

Lifer
Feb 8, 2000
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Just fix the damn 2D crashing. The mouse cursor thing is retarded, but something I can live with.

The card can run a game at over 90% load for over 6 hours straight, but it can't run 2 damn internet explorer windows without crashing for 3.
 

kalrith

Diamond Member
Aug 22, 2005
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Nice to see ATI focusing on drivers for a change...

One of the reasons why I have never used a ATI card for my gaming rig is the overall poor condition of their drivers. Always had better luck with nVidia in that regard. I use ATI cards in my secondary machines, but my two main machines have nVidia because of driver quality.

Just one more reason to wait and see what Fermi brings to the table, however I suspect they will need a few months to get that right as well. :)

(the above does ignore the mess that was nVidia's Vista drivers in 2007-08, but since I skipped Vista, I don't care, on Windows 7 now and very happy)

Are you serious? If you switched ATI with nvidia in your post, then it would make sense. ATI always does good work on their drivers. There have been several times in the past when an ATI card's performance would increase 10-20% from the improvement in drivers. I don't think that's the case with nvidia. When all other things are equal, I always go with ATI, because the chance for performance improvement from future drivers is much greater than with nvidia.
 

TXAngel08

Banned
Feb 13, 2010
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We'll have to agree to disagree...

nVidia offers speed improvements as well (just look at their release notes for specific game improvements), but that isn't why I would use them over ATI. I use them because they don't crash my machine and cause other odd problems, they don't take up a ton of resources, and they are more friendly to the community than ATI is (OpenCL, CUDA, user SLI profiles, etc.)

As I said, I have multiple cards from each company, have for years. Overall, I prefer the nVidia drivers.
 

Udgnim

Diamond Member
Apr 16, 2008
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It looks like unless you have Crossfire or Eyefinity, the new drivers won't change anything for you.

The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst™ 10.2:
�� DiRT 2 – Overall performance improves up to 8% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5970, ATI
Radeon™ HD 5800 series, and ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 series products
�� Battleforge – CrossFire ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 performance improves up to 6%
�� Unigine Heaven – DirectX 9 CrossFire performance has improved significantly on
ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 and ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 series products
�� The Chronicles of Riddick – Assault on Dark Athena – Overall performance on
ATI Radeon™ HD 5970 improves up to 4%

http://www2.ati.com/relnotes/Catalyst_102_release_notes.pdf

not much but still something. however, take into consideration ATI has 12 driver releases per year and it adds up.
 
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TXAngel08

Banned
Feb 13, 2010
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On that I agree... Even if you have a 4xxx series card, you should generally still upgrade your drivers. They tend to fix all kinds of small items every release, some documented, some not.