[trinibwoy]

Inquirer

More driver magic goodness

Originally Posted by The Inquirer

With current drivers, Nvidia will score 5000 points with the 6800 Ultra while the X800XT PR will score only 4500 with 4.9 drivers. With the new ATI driver codenamed 8.07, ATI score will jump to an incredible 5800. All these scores are on a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 machine. The ATI driver will be introduced as the Catalyst 4.10 and we learned it should get its WHQL very soon.

The Geforce FX 5950 Ultra will score a modest 1270 while the Radeon 9600XT will provide 1570 marks. The mainstream card kicks the former high end in its performance nuts.

The Geforce 6800 GT will score 4500.

You will be able to see many more scores on the 29th of this month at 3PM CET when Futuremark lifts the non disclosure agreement (NDA) veil.

[PowerK]

I wonder if Inq meant XT as in plain non-PE XT, or XT PE. And 1300 points improvement going from Catalyst 4.9 to Catalyst 4.10 ? Hmm.................. :?

[Tim Murray]

... why did it jump 1300 points? that seems, oh, I don't know, INSANE.

filtering tricks? am I allowed to say the naughty "shader replacement" word?

[trinibwoy]

Originally Posted by PowerK

I wonder if Inq meant XT as in plain non-PE XT, or XT PE. And 1300 points improvement going from Catalyst 4.9 to Catalyst 4.10 ? Hmm.................. :?

I think the 'PR' was supposed to be 'PE'. And not only is it 1300 points but it's a 29% increase

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by PowerK

I wonder if Inq meant XT as in plain non-PE XT, or XT PE. And 1300 points improvement going from Catalyst 4.9 to Catalyst 4.10 ? Hmm.................. :?

Looks like it's a typo - "XT PR" should be "XT PE", and it makes sense if you are comparing it to the 6800U.

[Miksu]

8.07 is the hotfix-driver which was released little earlier. It will be interesting to see which sites will be using these drivers in their tests and which will use older ones..

[Mendel]

http://www2.ati.com/drivers/hotfix/w...07-018380E.exe 8)

[trinibwoy]

Does this hotfix magic work on R3xx also?

[IbaneZ]

Hotfix indeed.

[Pete]

1. If it was Fudo who penned this, he probably meant to say XT PR, for obvious (availability) reasons.

2. Baron, "shader replacement" sounds so uncivilized. ATi much prefers the term "A.I." :P

3. 30%! I guess that makes nV's purported '05 boost with Rev's FM-approved NDA drivers look a little weak, by comparison. Does 3DM05 have a more comprehensive dev mode, to perhaps catch cheating--er, unusually intelligent drivers?

[Dave Baumann]

Hint: the performance only affects 256MB boards and only AGP (i.e. PCIe were there or thereabouts already)

[jvd]

Originally Posted by DaveBaumann

Hint: the performance only affects 256MB boards and only AGP (i.e. PCIe were there or thereabouts already)

tweaking the memory controller ? I wonder if it is the memory controller if we will see bigger performance gains in other games .

[pino]

Originally Posted by DaveBaumann

Hint: the performance only affects 256MB boards and only AGP (i.e. PCIe were there or thereabouts already)

so 9800XT too ?

[cloudscapes]

The ATI driver will be introduced as the Catalyst 4.10 and we learned it should get its WHQL very soon.

*confused* 4.9 < 4.10? If so, it should really be 4.09 to not confuse ATI noobs like myself.

[Dave Baumann]

4.10: 4 = year (2004), 10 = month (October)
Thats the catalyst release number. The drivers will have a driver number which is normally sequential (i.e. these drivers are the 8.07's).

[jvd]

Originally Posted by cloudscapes

*confused* 4.9 < 4.10? If so, it should really be 4.09 to not confuse ATI noobs like myself.

Yes , its the 10th release of the 4th year of catalyst . So its newer than the 9th release of this year

[mreman4k]

deja vu :?

[Padman]

/rant on

VERSION NUMBERS ARE NOT FRACTIONS!!!!!!

/rant off

[Reznor007]

Originally Posted by jvd

tweaking the memory controller ? I wonder if it is the memory controller if we will see bigger performance gains in other games .

The driver update mentions a memory allocation bug being fixed, so it probably has to do with that.

[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by Pete

3. 30%! I guess that makes nV's purported '05 boost with Rev's FM-approved NDA drivers look a little weak, by comparison.

Well, remember this?
before
after

I wonder if ATI did some insane shader replacement or just found a little bug slowing them down like mad. R3xx and R4xx always had quite optimal shader execution, so it would surprise me if it was the latter.

EDIT: Reznor007, you may be right. The X700 benchmarks are full of results that suggest memory allocation problems.

[Smurfie]

Nah, I would think it's just putting things back into its status quo.

525/400 > 5800/5000. ATI still has some work to do.

[FUDie]

Originally Posted by Smurfie

Nah, I would think it's just putting things back into its status quo.

525/400 > 5800/5000. ATI still has some work to do.

What a silly statement. Do you also compare AMD and Intel chips by looking at clockspeeds? If ATI and NVIDIA were selling the same chips, you might have a valid point.

-FUDie

[Smurfie]

Nope. Reason being, the 6800 and X800 pipelines are far more similar than the AMD and Intel CPU pipelines. The IPC count between 1 clock cycle with an AMD and Intel CPU is far more different than 1 clock cycle of a NV40 and R420 GPU.

Besides, fillrate still seems to be a major determinant, and those fillrates are directly tied to the clockspeeds. Until I see a many applications breaking that rule, it still stands.

[FUDie]

Originally Posted by Smurfie

Nope. Reason being, the 6800 and X800 pipelines are far more similar than the AMD and Intel CPU pipelines. The IPC count between 1 clock cycle with an AMD and Intel CPU is far more different than 1 clock cycle of a NV40 and R420 GPU.

Besides, fillrate still seems to be a major determinant, and those fillrates are directly tied to the clockspeeds. Until I see a many applications breaking that rule, it still stands.

So I guess you've forgotten about the free FP16 normalization in the NV40? Also, what if the benchmark is running in SM 3.0 for the NV40? Those are just some of the differences between the two architectures.

Your logic is flawed.

-FUDie

[cloudscapes]

Originally Posted by Padman

/rant on

VERSION NUMBERS ARE NOT FRACTIONS!!!!!!

/rant off

Okay okay sorry. My mistake. I've only been usign ATI drivers for like a month and a half. I had to find out eventually.