ATI Radeon X800XL 512MB & Catalyst 5.6 Driver Update

Name: ATI Radeon X800XL 512MB & Catalyst 5.6 Driver Update - Page 11
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, June 09, 2005, 08:30 AM EDT

Benchmarks & Comparisons With Half-Life 2

It Shipped! And it's GOOD!

Half Life 2

Thanks to the dedication of millions of gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. So, when Valve announced Half-Life 2 was close to completion in mid-2003, gamers the world over began chomping at the bit. Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network; the theft of a portion of the game's source code; a couple of missed deadlines; and a tumultuous relationship with the game's distributor, Vivendi Universal, we all had to wait until November 2004 to get our hands on this game. We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom- recorded timedemo in the "canals" map, that takes us through an outdoor and an indoor environment. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,024x768 and 1,600 x 1,200 without any AA or aniso and with 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

At 1024x768 neither the additional 256MB of additional RAM nor the Catalyst v5.6 drivers had any meaningful impact on performance in our custom Half Life 2 test, but it was a completely different story at 1600x1200. At the higher resolution, having the additional memory available increased performance by a few frames per second but the new Catalyst v5.6s affected performance significantly. With the Catalyst v5.6s installed, performance went down slightly when no AA or Aniso was used, but with AA and Aniso enabled performance jumped by almost 20 frames per second.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, Update, Date, PDA, drive, Catalyst, driver, ATI Radeon, Ive, TAL, X8

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com