Omegadrive driver set 2.5.90 released.

I did some testing/benchmarking with theses drivers and this is what I've come up with.

Catalyst AI pretty cool in some aspects, but basically it is mostly optimisations in Anisotropic Filtering and texture compression, that is of course the fact with every game, not only the ones with specific application detection.

Doom3 runs awesome with Catalyst AI enabled, because it contains the optimization for specular highlights. However, I found out something ugly about using the HIGH setting for Doom3. I play at 1024x768 2x FSAA 16x Aniso ULTRA QUALITY. If you use the Low/Normal setting for AI, Doom3 will have much higher performance from the special app specific Doom3 optimization, but if you use HIGH, in addition to whatever the low setting does for you, I observed ALL TEXTURES ARE COMPRESSED!! To basically put this, if you use Ultra Quality, you might as well be using High Quality because they are no different if you use the High setting in AI. In addition to all textures being compressed, brilinear filtering is enabled at a very low quality to improve framerate. Now on my systen, AI disabled gives me 44FPS, AI Low gives me 52FPS, AI High gives me 52.5FPS. I stick with the low setting to keep the textures uncompressed as is what the whole idea of Ultra quality is.

In Unreal Tournament 2004, Catalyst AI actually HURT my FPS numbers in my own custom timedemos by about 0.5FPS. Basically it does not improve performance one bit. I read it has UT2004 specific texture optimisations but from my experience it seems to be bullshit. Here are my findings for UT2004:

AI Off: TRUE Trilinear filtering
AI Low: Noticed some usage of bilinear filtering on first mipmap step, rest true trilinear
AI High: Bilinear on first step, rest a heavily optimzed brilinear.

In 3DMark03 and 05, I have progressive increases in my result as I went up the ladder AI Off, Low, and High.

I think that with high quality scenes using pixel shaders is where AI Low really shines, and with AI High, it shines even more if you are using Pixel shaders on top of uncompressed textures.

Your preference towards quality vs performance is up to you using Catalyst AI. I think it's an awesome feature to have control over speed/quality. However, if the lesser quality does not result in extra speed, which is the case with UT2004 (Probably because that game is mostly CPU-dependent), then it would be smart to disable it, and the fact I have that option is a really cool thing for ATI to do, because their previous drivers on my X800 Pro would use brilinear which pissed me off.

I would hope this gave people a better understanding of Catalyst AI and I'm definitely looking forward to their next released drivers and doing more testing!

 

Umm all I see...the only place I found something remotely giving me the ability to control the directx and opengl settings is in 3d tab...I guess he figured that merging the settings for textures, mipmaps, aa and af for opengl and directx is more economical...but it seems to me that if I change a setting for a particular directx specific app then the setting for the opengl app gets changed simulataneously...the changes I am reffering to are in the ATI control panel under the tab 3d which is under the tab advanced 3d. Am I making sense? If I download and install the radlinker program I get my options back...but AI is lost. I guess it is a choice then up to the end user which to use then?? Kinda confused here.

 

So JCap34 then the idea is that for each individual game to maximize the performance with regards to AI and various other driver settings you will have to change the settings manually when switching from playing say Doom 3 to Unreal Tournament? Since according to you there are some perfomance hits/boosts?

 

suryad, you really should explore the functions for having separate configurations for individual applications. The swiftest way is to right-click on any shortcut to a perticular game, or directly on that .exe, and choose "Custom Settings". After having done so you get extra tabs to the properties of that .exe or any link to it, where you can change all these types of settings for that individual application only.

 

mkk thx a bunch man!!

 

Which cards works AI with? Will work with my ancient 9500?

 

Yes: 9500 and up.

 

I like the interface. Much better than default Catalyst CP.

 

I don't see any AI stuff in my tabs.

 

JCap334.

I see wot u mean about doom 3.

I play it in 1024^768 , set on HIGH and x4 AA.

The prob with the brilinear filtering is back. [ catalyst 4.9's fixed this ]

timedemo demo 1 benchmarks:

cat 4.9 : 59fps omega 4.10 beta: 67fps

sacrficing image quality for performance?

Did u say setting it to Ultra high fixes this?

 

Apoc, OpenGL and Direct3D is now joined together. Menus are also different.
Remove all ATi related tweakers/overclockers/drivers, clean everythng with Driver Cleaner 3 and try again.

 

Thanks, I will try it later.

 

THis is what I mean. If you use Ultra Quality in Doom3, and set Catalyst AI to HIGH, that compresses textures basically makes Doom3 no longer Ultra Quality but High Quality. I was able to determine this because I saw texture artifacts when I used AI High. WIth AI Low, you can use Ultra Quality in Doom3 and have the textures remain uncompressed like they should be. With AI Low, you still get the app specific tweak and still have the huge performance increase. I recommend AI Low for DOom3 because AI High really doesn't help FPS much compared to Low.

 

You don't have to manually change settings for each game, thus since RadLinker is installed with these OMegas, all you have to do is rightclick on the shortcut for your game, and choose "Custom Settings", you'll see a small ATI logo next to it. Then you go to the properties of that short cut and you can set whatever you want for that particular game and it will not affect anything else. What I have observed is, if you want to have the changes work for direct 3D, you MUST have "Mode Change" Checked ON, otherwise it wont work. If the game is OpenGL you dont need to check Mode Change. I hope this has helped

 

I've looked at both Omega and DNA drivers and the difference isn't a lot.

The difference between those drivers is hardly worth the trouble of switching back and forth. Personally the Omega drivers are better because it comes with lots of tools and supports Mobility Radeons.

I recently found out about a new driver called Forsage. Not many people know about it and the creator is Russian I think.

Forsage offers an impressive performance increase compared to Omega and DNA. The best part is the download size is only 4-5 megs. There is no setup.exe so you need to manually install the drivers. It does seem to come with the basic ATI control panel.

http://www.hardwarelab.ru/forsage.php

Check out these benchmarks.

http://www.rage3d.de/catalyst_vergleich_eng_p2.php

Forsage is really worth a try.

 

custom game profiles

JCap334 i am now using the custom game profiles that u explained. I have different ai settings normal/high for each game. Should the ai settings in control panel on desktop be set to off? Or does it not matter?

It's just that i think they are contradicting each other.

also the custom settings are only workin for ut2004 when i launch game from desktop. When i launch it through ase, to play online the AA and AF custom settings arent on.

 

Re: custom game profiles

This is where the other part of Radlinker comes in. You have to create a Radlink. This option was the one above Custom Settings described above. The difference between this and custom settings is that Radlinks can be used in batch files and be called by other programs like ASE. When you create a radlink, you should see a <game>.radlnk in the same folder as the *.exe - quake3.radlnk for example. You modify the radlink in the same way you modify custom setting for an executable. You can also create shortcuts to the Radlink AFAIK. When you go back to ASE, enter the radlink file where you normally put the executable in the game selection or in your batch file. That should allow the custom settings to kick in. I'm surprised that ChrisW never was able to rectify this - needing both radlinks and custom settings. Maybe I'll ask him one day; there is probably a very good reason.

 

man that sounds a bit too complicated for me. I mean, i aint a complete noobie when it comes to pc's, but i think i would rather wait for a new version of radlinker that has the custom settings that apply to everthing automatically.

Will just change the AA, AF and AI settings on control panel 4 now.

thanks anyway.

( i might give it a go )