ATI's Catalyst 3.8 Drivers: ATI Sanctioned Overclocking
by Derek Wilson on October 8, 2003 3:02 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
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.
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Anonymous User - Saturday, October 18, 2003 - link
BFG Asylum nVidia FX 5950 Ultra 256MBGrab it @
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 14, 2003 - link
From a technical / technological aspect I find the Overdrive technology very interesting.I equate it to my background in automobile tuning. Carburated engines had a set timing. You set that timing sso the car would not knock and ping. Electronically controlled fuel injection allowed using different timing / fueling at different load point to extract the most from the engine. Same engine could maybe get 10% more power. Now you see very detailed EFI, where the engine computer advances and retards timing dynamically depending on octane, load and many other inputs, always giving near maximum possible output.
I see this as the beginning of the same trend in graphics cards. It makes sense.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 14, 2003 - link
This review was done with stock cooling. Those cards get hot real fast.Since Overdrive stops overclocking when it gets too hot, I would have like to see some form of ultra cooling on some cards like (at least) water-cooling.
The way I see it, Overdrive it pointless.
Anonymous User - Sunday, October 12, 2003 - link
ahaha @ 57Anonymous User - Sunday, October 12, 2003 - link
How long before we can buy a XT watercooled out of the box? I think that's the question remaining now.Anonymous User - Saturday, October 11, 2003 - link
cause your an idiotAnonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
why i cannot run halo i have a radeon 9000Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
52 - That is exactly what Anand did. They ran a benchmark - recorded the results - then ran another benchmark, and so on. That sounds like they did let it cool every 10 minutes or so. Unlike a real user.50 is partially right. The bus speed improvement when OC is enabled would give much better indication of what the XT is doing over some statistically ambivalent fps count.
Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
The HL2 stolen code setback seems to be perfect timing. Nivida has to be loving it, the bastards!The only good Dx9 game that should have been out with the Radeon XT would have put a nail in Nvidia.
Now Nvidia has breathing room. Lets see if they squander it.
Right now the clear winner for Dx9 is the ATI XT. That is if you are comparing the XT to the 5900 and not some vapour hardware.
You made the charts, take a look at them. ATI is clearly better at DX9 PS2.0. All the new DX9 games are not going to run better on Nvidia. The benchmarks for HL2 were already shown.
I don't see why you can't recommend a card at this time?
If you had 10,000 to bet which card would you pick to be the best dx9 card? If you bet on Nvidia your gonna be 10,000 poorer.
Anonymous User - Friday, October 10, 2003 - link
I agree, its much better than the last review. Thanks for the Fps in Tomraider.Do you know what the cap is for the XTs auto overclocking?
Wonder what it would do if you put water cooling on the ATI?