Drivers, Settings, and Testbed Configuration

Having installed the driver supplied together with the graphics cards, we saw at once that it is not marked as the final driver: the Options page indicated that it was CTALYST BETA DRIVER, and the Version field stated “6.14.10.6444”. Besides that there were no other differenced from the Catalyst 4.4 driver: all the pages and control panels of the new driver were absolutely the same as those of the catalyst 4.4/

However, despite the beta-status of the driver, this CATALYST version is the one tending to get WHQL-certified that is why we don’t think there can be any serious problems caused by the “unfinalized” driver.

The only unpleasant thing about using a beta-driver for the tests is the fact that its control panel doesn’t have any options for the management of the new full-screen anti-aliasing method, aka “temporal” anti-aliasing. ATI promises to finish the functions of the control panel in the next CATALYST driver release, and in the meanwhile temporal AA can be managed with the help of a special ATITemporalAASwitch.exe utility.

The testbed used for our test session was configured as follows:

• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3400+  (2.20GHz, 1MB L2);
• Mainboard: ASUS K8V Deluxe;
• RAM: OCZ DDR PC-3200 Platinum Edition EB (2x512MB, ÑL2.5-3-2-8);
• HDD: Seagate 7200.7, Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer;
• Audio: Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2;
• Software: Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP1, DirectX 9.0b;
• Drivers:  NVIDIA ForceWare 60.72, ATI CATALYST BETA 6.14.10.6444.

Our ATI RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition and ATI RADEON X800 PRO will compete with the following solutions during this test session:

• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
• ATI RADEON 9800 XT
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

Since we also included a solution based on the newest gaming graphics chip from NVIDIA, GeForce 6800 Ultra, the today’s battle for the 3D graphics leader title promises to be the bloodiest of all you witnessed this or last year.

During our discussion of the R420 architecture we will also offer you the results of some theoretical benchmarks, so that we could see, which chip boasts the today’s most advanced graphics architecture. And then we will face the battle of the giants from ATI and NVIDIA in a massive gaming duel, which will be described in detail in a separate article.