ATI Catalyst 4.8 & 4.9, Omega, DNA Driver Benchmarks

ATI Catalyst 4.8 & 4.9, Omega, DNA Driver Benchmarks
Posted :: Oct 2, 2004 by Haggs

Introduction:
Absolute Insight has once again put the Catalyst, Omega, and DNA drivers in the gladiator arena to duke it out for the championship title. Will ATI's latest Catalyst 4.9 reign supreme, or will it be another stalemate? ATI claims to have dramatically improved performance in both Doom 3 and UT2004 with their 4.9 release. The following is quoted from ATI's Catalyst 4.9 driver release notes:

"Doom3 performance improves 10-15% on ATI RADEON X800 XT products when anti-aliasing is enabled. UT2004 performance improves considerably on the ATI RADEON 9500 PRO, RADEON 9700 PRO RADEON 9800 PRO and RADEON 9800 XT products. The benefit can be 25% or more in some circumstances, particularly at extreme graphics settings such as 6xAA + 16xAF."

ATI doesn't mention anything about improvements for the Radeon 9800 Non-Pro card, but we'll see!

Test System Specs (same as first ATI driver test):

Processor: AMD XP2700+ cooled with Thermaltake Volcano 11+
Memory: 512M DDR PC2700
Motherboard: MSI KT4V with onboard 10/100LAN + AC '97 Audio
Sound Card: Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS
Power Supply: Antec 400 Watts "SL400"
Primary Monitor: Dell UltraSharp 1800FP 18" LCD
Secondary Monitor: Mag Innovision 986FS 19" CRT (disabled for these tests)
Speakers: Logitech 400Watt 4.1
Video Card: 128MB ATI Radeon 9800 AGP 8x by Sapphire Tech (Directx9.0c)
Hard Drive 1: Maxtor 60 GB w/2MB Cache (for Windows only)
Hard Drive 2: Seagate 160 GB w/8MB Cache (for everything else)
DVD-ROM: 16x
CD-RW: 52x24x52x
Operating System: Updated Windows XP Professional w/SP2

Method
We created a system restore point (visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/using/howto/gethelp/systemrestore.asp for more information on system restore points).

Next we installed our first driver and ran the five benchmarks: 3DMark03, AquaMark3, Gun Metal Benchmark 2, and Doom 3 respectively. Then we reverted back to our system restore point and benchmarked the next driver. The drivers were tested in the following order: DNA 2.6.4.8 (based on the Catalyst 4.8 driver), and Omega 2.5.67 (based on the Catalyst 4.8 driver), ATI Catalyst 4.8, ATI Catalyst 4.9 BETA, ATI Catalyst 4.9.