ATI Catalyst 9.1 Driver: Performance Express-Test

[Maziar]

There u go
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/catalyst-91_2.html#sect0

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

The hotfix was/is the 9.1's. Theres been several beta 9.1's out, and the hotfix was the main portion of them all, just derivatives of it. So, yes, theres been a massive increase in a few games as well, even tho some wont admit to it. Good to see, and no, these still dont have the quads optimisations on them, from what Im hearing, tho youll only see them in DX10

 

[hannibal]

Well, not bad indeed!
Is this purely because of multicore code enhancements?

 

[goonting]

is there no hope for my HD3870? hehehe

 

[murdoc]

Thanks OP for the post. I did feel that GTA 4 has gone smoother especially after their 1.2 patch

 

[yonef]

Thanks OP for the post. I did feel that GTA 4 has gone smoother especially after their 1.2 patch

hmm, I've tried with 8.12 and 9.1 - no difference at all. In fact I haven't noticed any difference from 812 to 9.1 on any game (Crysis, Crysis warhead, Far Cry 2, GTA IV, GRID)

 

[swifty_morgan]

This is what I had to say in a thread I posted last night.....


"I griped about how bad the 4870/512 card was since the time I bought it and started using it. Today, after owning it since it first came out, I now admit I finally have a card that IS good and I can finally use. What the heck took ATI so long to get the drivers right ? With the 9.1 drivers not only do the newer games work better, but the older games I play once in a while actually load and the ones that loaded play better too. Unfortunately I haven't tried COD W@W yet so I can't comment on weather or not the graphics are still messed up in spots.....????..... and weather it still laggs in the demanding spots.........however, Crysis actually plays very good and don't have to go to my machine with the GTX260's on it. This card is not on a fast machine and it is not playing DX10 graphics yet ( 939 dual @2.6 ) but might get around to it this weekend to see how it runs on a more modern machine. ( Intel quad setup )

I guess this means you guys can stop griping at me now when I say it's a piece of crap? LOL............ and if you guys thought it was so good, how come for me, on whatever machine I played it on, it totally sucked until now ? Wudup wit dat ? : "


Since then I ran it on an Intel quad set up. It ran equally as good in DX10 as it did in DX9. There is however still a glitch with water texture in FarCry2...... and probably still exists in COD W@W but I hate that game and didn't load it to find out. But FarCry2 plays smoother with the new driver vs ALL of the previous ones. What ever they did, they did right this time around..... weather the frame rates went up or not, it doesn't matter.............

 

[kelfen]

There has been substainal amount of work done by ATI with the 4xxx series with drivers especially to get solid drivers out since they were behind and went through a transition stage with not so good drivers to increasingly better.

 

[murdoc]

hmm, I've tried with 8.12 and 9.1 - no difference at all. In fact I haven't noticed any difference from 812 to 9.1 on any game (Crysis, Crysis warhead, Far Cry 2, GTA IV, GRID)

performance wise it wasn't a major increase but stability wise and playable frames is what I was referring to.

I was shocked to look at their change log only to find that they've improved stability. Normally one would expect performance gains but I'm glad they've made solid drivers. Maybe next month they will build ontop of this for performance

 

[blashyrkh]

I haven't noticed much in terms of performance, but I have a few problems with my 4870. First of all, since I installed it, my winXP boot times are terrible (it takes like 2 minutes to load). I have velociraptor and before the 4870 I had a 7800GTX. Loading times were less than 1 min. I googled a bit and found out some other ppl have the same issue but no word on how to fix it. Any ideas? I tried bootvis but it crashes and causes illegal operation.

My other problem is, I can't find AVIVO anywhere!!! When I installed the beta 8.12, the Avivo converter was working fine. When I upgraded to the official 8.12, the converter was gone!! Ok, I thought maybe I did something silly so I waited for 9.1 to come out. When I finally got my hands on the official 9.1, I paid attention on the installation, did custom install (drive cleaner used in safe mod, just to be sure I was clean) but still no AVIVO!!! What am I doing wrong? Please help me, as the AVIVO is pretty useful. (it sucks as a converter, but it's blazing fast).

Thank you all

 

[maximusmi2]

I installed the 9.1's but went quite quickly back to the 8.12's. I havent tested many games with the new drivers but I play quite a lot of LOTRO. The frame rate dropped from 60fps (v-sync on) to about 45-50fps. Also the AF seemed to be messed up as the ground in the game was just blurry where as before with antistropic filtering it was very sharp. I fiddled with the settings for an hour or so in game and in the CCC but nothing worked. I restored back and everything is fine again. Will probably wait for the next driver so see how they go.

 

[hannibal]

I haven't noticed much in terms of performance, but I have a few problems with my 4870. First of all, since I installed it, my winXP boot times are terrible (it takes like 2 minutes to load). I have velociraptor and before the 4870 I had a 7800GTX. Loading times were less than 1 min. I googled a bit and found out some other ppl have the same issue but no word on how to fix it. Any ideas? I tried bootvis but it crashes and causes illegal operation.

My other problem is, I can't find AVIVO anywhere!!! When I installed the beta 8.12, the Avivo converter was working fine. When I upgraded to the official 8.12, the converter was gone!! Ok, I thought maybe I did something silly so I waited for 9.1 to come out. When I finally got my hands on the official 9.1, I paid attention on the installation, did custom install (drive cleaner used in safe mod, just to be sure I was clean) but still no AVIVO!!! What am I doing wrong? Please help me, as the AVIVO is pretty useful. (it sucks as a converter, but it's blazing fast).

Thank you all

The loading times should not change so much. You most propable have somewhat maintainnance needed for you registry. Windows get slover and slover when the registry is getting more stuff in it. You may try some registry cleaner to speed things up.
So they would be slover now, even if you still would have your old 7800...
The Avivo thing is something that I don't know ansver. Clean reinstall???

 

[hannibal]

I installed the 9.1's but went quite quickly back to the 8.12's. I havent tested many games with the new drivers but I play quite a lot of LOTRO. The frame rate dropped from 60fps (v-sync on) to about 45-50fps. Also the AF seemed to be messed up as the ground in the game was just blurry where as before with antistropic filtering it was very sharp. I fiddled with the settings for an hour or so in game and in the CCC but nothing worked. I restored back and everything is fine again. Will probably wait for the next driver so see how they go.

You should send post to ATI's customer servise, so they can check this out. It can allso only be a combability error, if other customers don't have the same problem or something vent wrong with LOTRO compability. I have some times have problem when not doing complete driver remove operation before update, but not always... The computer science is not a computer science ;-)

 

[Guyver 25]

I have the 8.12 on my4850 but if i run 3d benchmark 2005 or 06 it just wont respond any ideas

 

[topper743]

I thought I would throw my hat in the ring. I had the 8.12 (not hot fix) installed. The system ran without problems. I just now installed the 9.1 driver. I ran 3Dmark 06 with the same settings on the system and found that I got a better benchmark number. It was 148xx and now is 15024 which in round numbers is about 200 better just from the new driver. I had no problems installing and the system is running fine. For me and this system the driver is a definite improvment. Besides the better bench score the graphics and windows seem a little snapier, frames opening and closing quicker.

9950be @ 3.112GHZ
m3a32mvp-deluxe wifi - latest bios
2x2GB gskill 4-4-4-12
HD 4870 1GB
win xp 32bit SP3

******************************************
I see AVIVO in the main window in CCC.
There is a patch for 3Dmark06, you'll have to google it.

 

[murdoc]

The loading times should not change so much. You most propable have somewhat maintainnance needed for you registry. Windows get slover and slover when the registry is getting more stuff in it. You may try some registry cleaner to speed things up.
So they would be slover now, even if you still would have your old 7800...
The Avivo thing is something that I don't know ansver. Clean reinstall???

Do NOT touch the registry! The windows is designed with tons of registry handling in mind. It does not need to be "cleaned" or "defraged" much by the user. On the contrary if the cleaner screws up then you will have a dead windows. Even with thousands of registries running on your computer it won't take up more than a few MB of your system memory. This is how light weight registries are.

Contact ATI for help.

 

[hannibal]

Do NOT touch the registry! The windows is designed with tons of registry handling in mind. It does not need to be "cleaned" or "defraged" much by the user. On the contrary if the cleaner screws up then you will have a dead windows. Even with thousands of registries running on your computer it won't take up more than a few MB of your system memory. This is how light weight registries are.

Contact ATI for help.

Hmmm... yeah you can make havoc to your system, but there are a lot of lost entries in registry, faulty settings etc, and It actually do get worse by the time. Reg cleaning is not an ideal solution, but it's faster than clean installation of windows that makes the same thing much better.

I have been using reg-cleaners for many years, and so far never have had problems with them (I don't normally do any ghanges manually though... Only ones I did have so bad problems with SONY software that manual cleaning was nesessary, but I would not recommended that to anyone...) Even Microsofts own OneCare system do some cleaning, allthough not very well... http://onecare.live.com/site/en-US/default.htm
But there allways is a risk ofcource. But if you wan faster responce time from your computer the reg-cleaners are reasonable solution.