The
Drivers
Since
the Rage Pro days ATI has long been criticized for poor driver quality. We had
flashbacks to the Rage 128 days after installing the AiW on our VIA KT133 based
test system, we hadn't even gotten the system running we were running into problems.
The driver installer twice messed up registry entry's, requiring a complete uninstall
and reinstall. As well the shipping Radeon drivers have compatibility problems
with some VIA chipsets requiring the user to remove specific ATI GART files for
the card to have any 3D functionality. Once getting all the driver conflicts sorted
out and removing the ATI GART driver from the test system we finally got a chance
to test this baby out. Unfortunately this was not the end of our troubles, we
experienced both stability and graphical problems in Half Life including texture
popping and bilinear filtering problems.
Shortly
after receiving the Radeon card ATI released the 4.13.7041 WHQL drivers. We had
already began benchmarking with the boxed drivers, but decided that because of
the driver problems we were experiencing, that testing would be done with the
new drivers.
New to
the 7041 drivers is the option of 2X FSAA in both Direct X and OpenGL, previous
drivers only supported 4X. Nothing too exceptional in the drivers at all.
We would really like to see some overclocking options and an advanced options
tab in the next driver release. More and more users are tweaking their hardware
to get maximum performance, and this is a serious lack of options. Also
in the new 4.13.7041 driver release, there is no support for the TV out
functionality, yet another small but nagging problem.
The
Test System