ATI Control Panel Setting "Catalyst A.I."

[Lord Banshee]

I recently receive my 1950XT and i have now started to play with the control panel options and looking at the detail. The one option i don't understand is the "Catalyst A.I." as in my Nvidia CP i turned off all optimizations, set to 16xAF, set to High Quality and i get great looking textures.

With This Catayst AI from what i read is a a smart way of optimization which it figures out what needs and not need optimizations. So i wanted to turn off all optimization as i do with my old Nvidia Card. And so be it see crappy textures in AOE3 shown in the below pic. With it set to standard, the textures look good, shouldn't it be the other way around? Also i notice my FPS is lower when it is set to "Standard" than "Disabled". So is it possible that ATI switched the setting properties? Anyone else want to try a game and see what results you get?

AOE3 CatalystAI Disabled
AOE3 CatalystAI Standard

 

[cmdrdredd]

The Catalyst A.I basically looks at the game engine you run and attempts to give a better quality picture at the expense of some FPS.

The sweet spot right now is to put the AI on standard and adjust your AA/AF as needed.

 

[dguy6789]

It was my understanding that Catalyst AI is a set of driver optimizations that improve performance. Standard is supposed to be a moderate amount of optimizations and is supposed to look identical to the "off" setting IQ wise but perform better. Advanced was supposed to go above and beyond with optimizations that drift into what some would call driver "cheating" territory to improve fps as much as possible while still looking good.

I personally use it on advanced. I have not noticed a visual difference between off and advanced, so I figure why not run the faster mode.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2220&p=1

 

[Lord Banshee]

Advance look very much like "standard"

So why do you think my "off" looks like crap?

 

[BFG10K]

Catalyst AI also includes application specific fixes and compatibility flags. If you turn it off it runs all games the same way so they might not run properly, kind of like if you delete an nVidia profile that has been setup for compatibility purposes.

Leave it on standard.

 

[evolucion8]

I'd noticed differences in image quality in my old Radeon X800XT PE when I played Doom 3 between Advanced and Standard A.I. In advanced I see some color banding when some particles are fading away, the same in Half Life 2, some color banding in dark areas. In standard the FPS difference is so low that doesn't worth the image quality degradation for a very few more FPS going from Standard to Advanced. I Haven't analyzed it yet on my X1950