Looking Back Pt. 2: X800 & Catalyst Under The Knife
by Ryan Smith on February 22, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
9700 Pro vs. X800 Pro
Now that we’ve seen what the X800 Pro has been through in its lifespan, what about the 9700 Pro? One of the biggest requests for inclusion in this series is a direct comparison between the two cards, which we have set up here. Along with the request to use newer games on the 9700 Pro, we have gone ahead and run the 9700 Pro through the same paces on some of the more promising games that we’ve run the X800 Pro through, and recorded the results as a performance factor for each card over its performance on the previous driver revision. For the sake of time and minimizing any impact that a CPU-limited scenario would have, all tests were run with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. We have also included a performance summary, showing the performance factor between the first 4.05 drivers, and the latest 6.01 drivers on these games.
Of course, at around half the framerate of an X800 Pro, the 9700 Pro is measuring some of its performance changes in fractions of a frame per second, so a 17% improvement in Battlefield 2 performance may not change playability at all, but nonetheless, this is a stark reminder of the power of drivers that comes in to play well after the launch of a product. Although this may be a rare scenario due to the architectural similarities between the 9700 Pro and the X800 Pro, it’s good to see that the 9700 series was not forgotten about at ATI when it was replaced by the X800. Hopefully, this isn’t a trend that will be forgotten with the X800 series either, now that the X1000 series is ATI’s high-end product line.
Now that we’ve seen what the X800 Pro has been through in its lifespan, what about the 9700 Pro? One of the biggest requests for inclusion in this series is a direct comparison between the two cards, which we have set up here. Along with the request to use newer games on the 9700 Pro, we have gone ahead and run the 9700 Pro through the same paces on some of the more promising games that we’ve run the X800 Pro through, and recorded the results as a performance factor for each card over its performance on the previous driver revision. For the sake of time and minimizing any impact that a CPU-limited scenario would have, all tests were run with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. We have also included a performance summary, showing the performance factor between the first 4.05 drivers, and the latest 6.01 drivers on these games.
Of course, at around half the framerate of an X800 Pro, the 9700 Pro is measuring some of its performance changes in fractions of a frame per second, so a 17% improvement in Battlefield 2 performance may not change playability at all, but nonetheless, this is a stark reminder of the power of drivers that comes in to play well after the launch of a product. Although this may be a rare scenario due to the architectural similarities between the 9700 Pro and the X800 Pro, it’s good to see that the 9700 series was not forgotten about at ATI when it was replaced by the X800. Hopefully, this isn’t a trend that will be forgotten with the X800 series either, now that the X1000 series is ATI’s high-end product line.
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lombric - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link
It may be interesting to see the evolution in cpu discharge under various video format and in image quality.I know that the introduction of AVIVO in recents drivers was very efficient for the X1xx serie but what about the R420? No chance to have similar results?
Egglick - Friday, February 24, 2006 - link
As far as I know, the X1x00 cards are the only ones with AVIVO, or at least the entire feature set.So does that mean that a $80 X1300 has better video playback than a X850XT PE?? Yep.
pkw111 - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link
... but their conclusion is rather boring. True it may be good solid research, but how about some studies that give colorful results, liek comparing the non-offical ATI drivers, such as WarCat, Omega, ngo, etc.Egglick - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link
I think it's a little too early to make guesses about the R5xx series right now. Don't forget that both the X800Pro and the 9700Pro are R300 based, and what we're looking at is a cumulation of 3+ years of tweaking and optimizing. The R580 has been out for what, a month?We could still see very radical performance boosts for R5xx based cards, particularly the R580 with it's unique shader architecture. It's also possible that performance boosts in new games will be even larger once the successive driver has been optimized for it. Basically, it's a whole new architecture, and what may have been true for both of these R300 based cards may not be true at all for R5xx.
Also, the CCC is garbage. Boo to ATI for forcing us to use it.
DieBoer - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link
I just wish ati would stop wasting time on optimising 3dmark and start with games. No serious gamer would take notice at all at 3dm scores only the average joe.Spoelie - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link
The most horrifying thing about CCC is the horrendous memory usage. I had been using the normal control panel all this time but recently formatted and downloaded the latest drivers. WindowsXP's memory usage after bootup went from ~70 something (not much had been installed yet) to a full fledged 200mb!! Only from installing the f*cked up driver.After some tweaking (disabling all ATi's added services and the CCC entry in the registry's startup) I'm back at around ~95mb after startup, which I was at before the format.
Still find it incredible in what kind of default configuration the CCC 'ships'.
Questar - Thursday, February 23, 2006 - link
Your saw rhings that weren't there - XP's footprint is much larger than 70MB.Spoelie - Friday, February 24, 2006 - link
Not really, once you start tweaking and don't have all programs installed, around 70 is really not that much of a stretch without programs open. Even so, even if the task manager for some reason is lying about the absolute numbers, there was a difference of 130mb just by installing a driver.abhaxus - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
i find it surprising that you did not run the test with a dual core CPU to see if the dual core optimizations actually did anything in the new drivers. i know there was a writeup on them awhile back with the 5.12s i believe but i'd like to see if newer versions got any further improvement.SonicIce - Wednesday, February 22, 2006 - link
You can create a short 300 frame timedemo for Farcry and play it back with the http://www.hardwareoc.hu/index.php/p/download/st/....">Farcry bench tool in screenshot mode. This will give you perfectly consistant results. I did it once to compare the shadows on the weapon.