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Radeon 9600 XT Driver Control Panels
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Catalyst 3.8 Version Drivers |
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Released
hand-in-hand with the 9600 XT were the Catalyst 3.8 drivers,
dubbed the "most significant software update in [ATi's]
history." Before the introduction of the Catalyst
series, driver support was always a sore point with ATi.
With each subsequent release so far, however, they have improved the
stability and options available to Radeon owners. It
can be said that a piece of hardware is only as good as the
drivers behind it, so with the release of the 9600 XT and
9800 XT bringing more power to the table, it was good timing
to release a new set of drivers that fully take advantage of
that power.
Adapter Info
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Options
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SMARTGART
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Displays
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VPU Recover
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Color
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The
Adapter info tab quickly identifies the card, showing off
the chip type as the 9600 XT, while also displaying the
RAM speed and amount. Options allows you to view the
driver version and decide whether or not you would like to
use the ATi's taskbar for quick settings changes.
Many of the other screens should be familiar for most of
our readers, so we'll skip to what's new and exciting.
The first new tab is something called VPU Recover, and it
may also be one of the most interesting. By checking
the top box to enable VPU Recover, you actually enable the
drivers to restart the graphics core should it fail
to respond to driver calls. In the short term, this
means that you wouldn't have to even restart Windows
should a problem occur with the Radeon XTs. This
addition is actually a requirement for the next version of
Windows, codenamed Longhorn, and ATi has jumped the gun
here by including it so soon.
Gamers
should be on the lookout for the 3D tab, as just about all
of the quality settings are found within. The first
thing you notice when clicking on the 3D tab are the
current video quality settings such as maximum resolution
and AA and AF samples being used. Direct3D and
OpenGL are kept separate from each other as they were in
the past, and for those less inquisitive, a slider bar can
be used to set the level from performance to quality, or
anywhere in between. Click on 'Custom' and the
SMOOTHVISION 2.1 settings are available, almost
identically for both APIs. Anti-aliasing and
Anisotropic Filtering measures can be left under the
control of the application, or automatically set to the
desired level. Beneath these are more sliders with
preferences for the texture level and mipmap detail, as
well as the ability to turn off Vertical Sync.
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3D
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SMOOTHVISION
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SMARTSHADER
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If one is quick to make their choices and leave, they just
might not notice an additional section called SMARTSHADER,
which allows for some really cool effects for either kinds
of games. There's no real benefit in doing this, but
it really does look cool to play games in a new
environment. We took the liberty of checking out a
few of these effects, putting Comanche 4 into black and
white (although some items were still colored) and inverse
mode for Direct3D testing and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
had us running scared in OpenGL's sketch mode.
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COMANCHE 4 - B&W |
COMANCHE 4 - INVERSE |
WOLFENSTEIN - SKETCH |
One feature that we were eager to take a look at was the
ATi Overdrive tab, which is supposed to enable automatic
stable overclocking based on the reported temperature of
the core. It would only function on XT based cards
as the R/RV360 is the only current graphics core to have a
built in thermal diode. Unfortunately, we were
unable to get this to work with the 9600 XT as we had with
the 9800 XT. ATi has since informed us that although
missing from the Catalyst 3.8 drivers, it will definitely
be supported in the Catalyst 3.9s with the 9600 XT.
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Screenshots With The Radeon 9600 XT |
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The
9800's Looks, Without its Price Tag |
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Before we
get to the benchmarks, we wanted to get a comparison of
screenshots from the Radeon 9600 XT and a GeForce FX 5600,
another video card geared toward mainstream users.
In this day and age, it doesn't make much sense to invest
in a high-powered graphics card unless you plan on playing
your games at higher resolutions and optimizing the
display by enabling AA or Anisotropic Filtering.
Faster frame rates are great, especially during
multiplayer romps online, but image quality should never
be sacrificed in order to obtain them. We took two
new games that hit the retail shelves recently to see how
the two cards compared when viewing identical locations.
As you may have heard, TRON
2.0 is one of the games that comes with the tagline,
"NVIDIA, the way it's meant to be played". What this
boils down to is the developer of the game, Monolith, has
somewhat partnered with NVIDIA when producing the effects in
the game. This has caused some consternation amongst
gamers, since game play should be the same for all players
regardless of what video card they own. Monolith has
maintained that with NVIDIA-based cards, they will be able
to achieve the "glow" that is the signature of the movie,
and now the game. So, what do we think? Well,
after taking a look at the Radeon and GeForce images side by
side, we would be hard pressed to say that there was any
real difference between the two. Moving past this, we
took a look at how the game fared when AA and AF were put
into effect. The best way to make comparisons between
the sets of images is to look closely where the black stripe
in the middle meets the white background. Without AA,
both images are on par with each other. However, when
we get to 4XAA with 8XAF, the separation line is nearly
perfect with the Radeon 9600 XT, whereas the GeForce FX 5600
is clearly suffering from the "jaggies".
The Test System, AquaMark3 & Halo
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