new catalyst drivers

[cadaveca]

there is a new flava of driver @ ati now.....temporal anti-aliasing...
release 2 days ago... personally i think it's crap.... details have been changed drastically... and if you have 3dmark03, check out the girls arms in test 3.... the cpu test looks better! (this may also just be due to the caqrd that i have...ASUS always releases thier own drivers for their card as their design as far away from the reference..no other XT has vivo).

let me know what ya all think!

[karbon86]

i don't use the ATI.com drivers anymore i'll just wait till the Omega drivers come out and are all cleaned up with his goodies

[cadaveca]

last version of omega drivers did not perform as well as the stock ati's fo me... not reference card though.

[karbon86]

i'm on a 9800pro 128mb 256 bit and i tested and got about a 150 pt increase with the omega and then i overclocked it to 452/385 and i'm at like 6900+ in 3dmark03 but haven't broken 7k without artifacts.

[cadaveca]

i found that my 128's mem won't go higher than yours.,...even though the mem is rated 4 400 mhz..i think i has to be cas 2.5 to make 400 and all the current biuoses thati have been able to find are set to a CAS of 2.
don't have a vpu that will top 420...so you got a golden one if that is stock. do you know what the vpu voltage is?

[karbon86]

yeah i'm running at 1.8v on my MSI K8TNEO. i can run my mem at 400 but then i can only get my gpu at 420 before it artifacts so i turn the mem down a bit and ramp up the gpu artifact free at 450

[karbon86]

i also put artic silver 5 on the HSF and OCZ ramsinks on the ram and have a side pannel fan blowing right on the card

[cadaveca]

i have the side panel fan too.. but the heatsink on these asus cards is HUGE...big copper plate, alum sinkd, and a heatpipe on the vpu side between the 2 alum heatsinks. i've got 1.72v....so i gotta v-mod before i can get higher.(stock xt!)

[cadaveca]

that';s another thing that baffles me...with the extra power connector, why is it that we still ahve issues when clocking ram and vpu to the max? the only reason for having to lower one to get the other higher is because the card can't get more voltage.. i'm pretty sure that should you cool that puppy better and give it 1.9v you'd get to 525 or so....but you'd only notice a performance difference of about 1-5 fps...until you up resolution and AF/AA

[karbon86]

yeah i'm thinking about getting a new card but i'm gonna wait till after hl2 comes out to see if the x800 pro will be enough and then overclock that with maybee some watercooling? who knows

[cadaveca]

i've seen both a x800pro and XT in action.... wait for the XT with 16 pipes. gets over 10000 in 3dmark03

[karbon86]

yeah i guess i'll just wait cuz my card holds it down in far cry and it should be ok for hl2 until the x800XT is out

[dod]

Which of the ATI drivers do you guys use for image quality rather than performance?

[karbon86]

personally i don't really sit in fron of my monitor looking for differences in the picture. i'm looking for that flash of light from the sniper scope so i can come from behind and knife them (Far Cry). But anyways idk i can't tell a difference. I use the omega drivewrs because with my card they perform best and have all the tools i need like radlinker/atitool etc. so it makes it easy.

[keithwalton]

temporal aa has been in the previous few drivers if you knew where to look for it ;-) as for the 3dmark bug that was in the release notes for it.
I've got the asus 9800xt too, vivo on it is rather good, shame ati's prog doesnt work as asus's is as buggy as 'eck. I'm using dscaler atm though which is neat

K

[cadaveca]

i prefer the 801 asus driver for my card...but i always install the enhanced and don't delete it first. this get my asus 9800 pro 5735 in 3dmark03...and i don't change the settings from the driver install. Far Cry is buggy @ best....even though all the updates and patches deal with one or another, i always have issues lately.
the omega drivers don't all work well with the asus card when you enable anti-aliasing or antistropic filtering..it seems as though he forgets every second driver to remember the asus cards.
the biggest problem that i have found with the newest and my card is OGL performance took a dip..about 9-12 fps in counterstrike and quake.