Intro:
With the introduction of ATI’s newest driver, the Catalyst™ 4.4, on April 7th, we were prompted to take it for a test drive. When new graphics drivers are released companies like to brag about increases in performance. We tested the latest three versions of the Catalyst™ (4.2, 4.3, and 4.4) on a 128MB Radeon9800 graphics card to get some solid results from trusted 3dMark01SE (build 330) and 3dMark03 (build 340) benchmark programs. The results turned out to be quite the surprise (but probably not what ATI would have liked to show off).
Test Machine Specs:
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
(Directx9.0b)
Hard Drive 1: Maxtor 60 GB w/2MB Cache (for Windows only)
