ATI's Catalyst 3.8 Drivers: ATI Sanctioned Overclocking

Final Words

In light of our final testing, it is very important to mention that we did not shut down the system and let the card cool down between each test. It is therefore possible that we didn't see the highest potential performance gains we could have from each game. Ideally we would have done this, but we've only had these drivers for a day, and we didn't know the extent to which continued use would affect the cards performance. Of course, this isn't all bad.

The fact that this card overclocks itself based on temperature allows at lot of room for differentiation between different R360 based products. The type of cooling card makers decide to strap on these chips will directly affect how much performance a user can get out of the overdrive feature. Since this doesn't involve doing things like tweaking core and memory clock speeds at the OEM side, more manufacturers can offer cards that have the performance of overclocking with the rock solid stability ATI’s overdrive feature offers. All that's necessary for more consistent performance gains is a better cooling solution.

Of course, we don't know how intensive cooling will affect maximum performance as we don't know the upper limit of ATI’s automatic clock settings.

Overall, these drivers offer some very good UI enhancements, and the overdrive feature does provide tangible speed improvements, and hopefully their VPU Recovery feature will save some people the trouble of blindly rebooting their systems when they lose video. Unfortunately, we didn't see the image quality fixes for TRAOD and Neverwinter Nights that we wanted. Hopefully ATI will not stand by and hope enough people think NVIDIA’s image quality is poor enough that the issue with their own product can go ignored.

Of course, the speed gains from this driver release are not astronomical, but when we add these small gains to the gains already seen in the 9800XT, we can definitely say that this is a solid, well rounded, fall refresh product from ATI. We applaud ATI for trying to go in new directions to enhance performance, and we hope to see plenty of cards from their partners that take advantage of the opportunity presented to them by the XT line. Even so, we are still standing behind our wait and see recommendation with respect to purchasing a card intended for use with the coming DX9 games.