CATALYST 4.9 Beta drivers for doom 3

[Robor]

Heh, where's Rollo at? His 6800 nearly matches the X800Pro and is only 7 FPS behind the X800XT @ 1600x1200...

From that article: "We do understand that not everyone reading this article can go out and plunk down $500 bucks on a new video card, however, there are great performance values with the likes of NVIDIA?s 6800 ? a card priced at a level ATI doesn?t compete well at."

 

[ShawnD1]

Seems hard to believe I'm the only person here who saw a major difference. Here's my system:
Athlon 3200+
Asus A7N8X-X
1GB PC3200 RAM
Radeon 9600XT

I don't have actual numbers, but I know there is a big improvement. With 4.7 drivers, the frame rate would just die when shooting the shotgun. It would go from 40 to 5, literally. With 4.9 beta drivers, the frame rate goes from 60 to about 30 when shooting the shotgun. Still sort of crappy, but much better than before.

 

[faye]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
Seems hard to believe I'm the only person here who saw a major difference. Here's my system:
Athlon 3200+
Asus A7N8X-X
1GB PC3200 RAM
Radeon 9600XT

I don't have actual numbers, but I know there is a big improvement. With 4.7 drivers, the frame rate would just die when shooting the shotgun. It would go from 40 to 5, literally. With 4.9 beta drivers, the frame rate goes from 60 to about 30 when shooting the shotgun. Still sort of crappy, but much better than before.

when u play the demo1(timedemo demo1)
do u see slow motion in the first 10 to 15 seconds(when 2 aliens are firing fireballs at u)?

and then when u go into the room where u see 2 or 3 pump on a lower floor, do u see choppy?

 

[Somniferum]

1024 - High Quality - 0xAA 0xAF (changed in .cfg)
timedemo demo1 1

Cat 4.7 - 43.1
Cat 4.9 - Crashes to desktop before finishing demo

This is a driver from hell for me ... I uninstalled 4.9 and re-installed 4.7, and found that even with the 4.7s I couldn't get through a timedemo without crashing now -- even at stock speeds! Yikes...

Finally was able to fix the problem by uninstalling again, booting to Safe Mode, running Driver Cleaner and reinstalling 4.7 again.

One other thing I noticed -- I have to clock my GPU down to 410 with the 4.7s to get rid of white/red dot artifacts. With the 4.9s the artifacting is much worse and I had to clock down even further (~400).

Hopefully the official 4.9s will be more stable on my system!

 

[Manzelle]

Originally posted by: Manzelle

Originally posted by: Manzelle
I am running 4.8 right now and get 48.3fps @ 1024x768 on High Quality with no AA...I'll install the 4.9 drivers in a bit and let you know how they go...
By the way, here are my general specs...

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ @ 2.3GHz (200x11.5)
Epox 8RDA3+ Rev. 3.2 - 5/13/04 Beta BIOS
1GB Corsair TWINX1024-3200C2PRO
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (420/750)
Windows 2000 SP4

Before: 48.3fps - 1024x768 High Quality NoAA
After: 48.6fps = 1024x768 High Quality NoAA

After installing the Arctic VGA Silencer Rev. 3 I was able to overclock my 9800 Pro to 444/780...I now get 50.3fps on 1024x768 High Quality NoAA...

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: faye
when u play the demo1(timedemo demo1)
do u see slow motion in the first 10 to 15 seconds(when 2 aliens are firing fireballs at u)?

and then when u go into the room where u see 2 or 3 pump on a lower floor, do u see choppy?

It's a little slow, but I wouldn't say it's choppy. Playing that demo at 1024x768, 2x AA, 2x AF, medium quality, I got 22.5 fps.

 

[Schadenfroh]

benchmarks of new drivers

 

[Jeff7181]

This is amazing... you're getting 50 frames per second at 444/780? I'm getting 50 frames per second at 395/760 with 4.7's with the details all the same. I have a VGA Silencer R3 too and it didn't do SHYT for my overclock, lol. Get white sparkles above 400... runs VERY cool though.

 

[Manzelle]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
This is amazing... you're getting 50 frames per second at 444/780? I'm getting 50 frames per second at 395/760 with 4.7's with the details all the same. I have a VGA Silencer R3 too and it didn't do SHYT for my overclock, lol. Get white sparkles above 400... runs VERY cool though.

What's the rest of your system? CPU, etc...

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: Manzelle

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
This is amazing... you're getting 50 frames per second at 444/780? I'm getting 50 frames per second at 395/760 with 4.7's with the details all the same. I have a VGA Silencer R3 too and it didn't do SHYT for my overclock, lol. Get white sparkles above 400... runs VERY cool though.

What's the rest of your system? CPU, etc...

1 GB PC3500 @ 2-3-3-11
Barton @ 2.48 GHz
A7N8X Deluxe

Oh wait, nevermind I'm stupid... I misread what you wrote... mine's 50 FPS on MEDIUM quality. About 43 on High.

 

[dfloyd]

Got to read the fine print. They state in the small print that older cards like the 9800 XT, 9800 Pro, and 9700 Pro will see little or no gain. In fact they could actually run slower. These drivers are specifically for the X800. Kind of pissed me off personally. I honestly thought they were doing a generic rewrite, not doing specific tweaks for the new cards and ignoring the old cards.

 

[Markfw]

New info for those with Opteron systems (and maybe other socket 940 systems ??) Use the motherboard drivers that are the latest, but the AGP drivers that come with the motherboard. At least that fixest my performance problems, and hopefully my stability problems too ! I now have all acceleration enabled (see other post) and I got 10k in 3dmark03 at default settings. (mixture quality and speed I think)

 

[Schadenfreudex]

43.1 1024x768 high
46.1 1024x768 med
51 800x600 high
52.6 800x600 med

amd thoroughbred at 2.2 ghz

9800 pro softmod XT

512 pc3200

4.8 beta
with 4.9 beta - same exact scores

 

[Schadenfroh]

my friend did this on his 9800 pro

>>>>As long as vsync is off things run pretty well. Should have done this
test
>>>>before I downloaded the beta patch in order to see the difference from
the
>>>>4.7. Anyhoo...here are my results of timedemo demo1:
>>>>
>>>>Settings:
>>>>
>>>>High - 1024x768 - 4AA = 21.7 FPS
>>>>High - 1024x768 - 0AA = 32.1 FPS
>>>>High - 800x600 - 4AA = 28.3 FPS
>>>>High - 800x600 - 0AA = 37.5 FPS
>>>>
>>>>I rarely turn on AA when playing games, but I could notice a difference.
>>>>What do you all prefer...a higher resolution or higher AA setting?

 

[Saist]

Just want to add my 2cents...

personally I would have rather liked a new set of WinXp 64 drivers that Enable OGL so I could play D3 on ATi products without having to drop back to Win2k Pro.

In any case, as to the drivers themselves, I don't see much difference when actually playing Doom3 even though the "maximum" frame rate jumps up a bit. I've also found that on my owns systems Beta Cat 4.9 gives about 2%-6% more frames per title at the same clock speeds. I can generally pull higher numbers from a "true" Athlon64 3200 than I pull from an equally clocked Athlon64 2800 (~2ghz) both on Radeon 9800 Pro's at 378 / 338 MHz. Yeah, I know that the doubled cache of the 3200 helps in some cases, but it shouldn't make that big a difference. I've found that apps that benifit from the cache might see higher than 5% average performance difference...

My only major Complaint about Beta Cat 4.9 is that All-In-Wonder Users are left sitting in the cold. The Cat's appear to improve OGL performance and help boost some higher level DX9 functions, which is well and good for most Radeon users. But AIW users are left sitting with many non-functional parts of the package. No VIVO, no TV, no audio. Kinda of Bites really.

 

[ksherman]

Oh! and ill get some benchmark numbers for my 8500!!!!!!

 

[ksherman]

I actually experienced a *decease* in performance. I could be that i am trying to run it on a Radeon 8500 at 1024x768 at Ultra Quality... (The game became much choppier than with the Omega Drivers)

But there actually was a decrease in perfomance from my Omega drivers, but what I notice is an increase in performance in UT2004! It runs MUCH better now. added maybe 5-10fps, enough to bring it over 30fps that I need to make the game enjoyable.

 

[Schadenfroh]

looks like the performance boost comes from forcing 16bit textures:
Text

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
looks like the performance boost comes from forcing 16bit textures:
Text

I did notice that Doom 3 looked a little different after getting 4.9 drivers. I didn't look like it was 16-bit color though.

 

[GeneralGrievous]

If you read the rest of that thread a lot of people are saying that is FUD.

 

[SickBeast]

I have no noticeable decrease in image quality, and I gained 10% at 1024 and 6% at 1280 on a 9700PRO.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
looks like the performance boost comes from forcing 16bit textures:
Text

If you read further down that thread you will see that it's FUD. Other people posted similar screenshots with no artifacts.

The performance boost is coming from the fact that ATi didn't touch its OpenGL driver for over a year, and then suddenly assigned their entire driver team to it.

 

[OnEMoReTrY]

Yea lol look at the fake pictures, the entire picture is 16 bit lol look at the gun =O

 

[Cherub]

I have 9800P>xt, i see posts that anything slower than x800 only has less than 1fps gain which is no gain

I don't think I saw a performance increase with my OC'd 9800Pro (475/756), but I was getting a lot of snow on many surfaces with the 4.7's and it totally went away with the 4.9 betas, so I didn't need to drop my OC. If, however, it was accomplished by reducing some aspect of detail on the textures, I'm not sure I would consider it a gain.

 

[KevinH]

Originally posted by: brigden
I'm running:

2700+
8RDA+
1GB PC3200
9700 Pro
WinXP Pro

Cat. 4.9

1024x768, High Quality, no AA.

I run timedemo demo1 and the result is always about 35 fps.

Some of you have similar rigs - how are you getting 40% more performace?

Dude Brigden I'm in your shoes too dude. I'm getting about 35fps and my cpu is @ 3100xp+ levels. WTF....Wat're u guys doing wit u're 9700 pros?