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HaMMerHeD
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2004
- Messages
- 10,397
I would like to start by saying that I have nothing but respect admiration for ATI hardware. Their drivers have suffered some severe quality issues in the past, but those have been rectified, for the most part. In any case, they are no better or worse than NVIDIA's current driver set.
Their control panel interface, on the other hand, is, and has always been, bad. The following is my opinion on the quality of the ATI Catalyst Control Center 7.2. It does not necessarily represent the opinions, views, or beliefs of [H]ard|OCP or [H]Enthusiast in any way. The green numbers on the below screenshot represent specific issues that I have with the interface design. I spent a long time designing user interfaces for software with thousands of users across the United States. Granted, that is not a huge amount of users, and it is limited to the USA, but the experience is there, dealing with people from all walks of life and will all manner of personal perferences and comfort levels with computers.
1.) The divider between the left hand list and the right hand control set should be moveable. That would allow users to make it bigger and reduce the scrolling required to see the items in the list view. This is not something that is difficult to accomplish.
2.) The entire window should be resizeable. This, again, is not a difficult change. As a matter of fact, the default setting for new windows created in Visual Studio is resizeable, unless they specifically created this window from the dialog box template. They had to change it to make it a fixed size.
3.) The ATI Catalyst Control Center logo is useless. It takes up space, and the list view above it has to have vertical scroll bars. Users are already aware that the window they are looking at is ths Catalyst Control Center. The title bar says so. Removing this logo would allow space for the list box above it to be larger, and reduce the amount of scrolling. Sure, you can click on it and go to ati.amd.com, but why would I need to do that from here? Perhaps if the link went somewhere useful (like a download page, a support page, an FAQ page, or a CCC manual) it might be more useful, but as it is, it is not useful at all.
4.) There is no cancel button. Sometimes, users want to get into the control panel to check a setting, not necessarily change a setting. Granted, it is not difficult to click the close button on the title bar, but a Cancel button would be nice. Pressing escape would be a good way to be able to close this interface without saving any settings, but that doesn't work (yes, I checked).
5.) Tabbed interface? Why? There is only one tab? The tab control needs to go away. That would free up window real estate better used for actual controls.
6.) The list view window is too small. Scrolling around in such a small window is a serious drag. Addressing issues number 1 and 3 would help this problem.
7.) I am already aware that I am looking at Adaptive Anti-Aliasing settings. I clicked on that in the menu on the left. Why do I need a big banner to tell me what I clicked on? This is a waste of space that could be better used by something useful. If I need to be reminded of what I clicked on, I can just look on the left hand side and see.
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Now, there are a few things that are good about it, especially in version 7.2. First, they have obviously dropped the oh-so-snazzy silver theme and real-time rendered blurry car driving down a blurry street. It loads faster...a lot faster. That is probably because it's not loading the MDX runtimes to support the aforementioned blurry car and blurry street. It loads so fast now that now I question the need to have a splash screen for it. It just flashes on the screen for a split second and goes away. The splash screen used to be useful, as it told you that the CCC was loading, in case you had forgotten whether or not you actually clicked on it. Now, it could be eliminated altogether and I don't think too many users would lose much sleep over it. Also, the 3 CLI tasks that used to run to provide the "service" have been reduced to 1.
The preview is nice, and better than it used to be. I applaud their effort to show the difference that these settings can make, individually. However, I still question the need. Are there a lot of users changing AF or AA settings who don't already know what these settings do?
-------------------------------------
Then there's this:
I got this error message while I was playing a game. The CCC was not open. The game did not crash. Apparently, just the Catalyst Control Center Host Application crashed. It chucked me to my desktop to tell me about it. When I dismissed the error message, I went back to the game and played without any problems. Lame. What good is reducing your thread count, if the thing is just going to crash?
-------------------------------------
I don't expect ATI to care what I think about it. I certainly don't expect them to change anything just because I think it stinks. I just felt the need to share my opinion of a perennial problem. Thanks for reading.
Their control panel interface, on the other hand, is, and has always been, bad. The following is my opinion on the quality of the ATI Catalyst Control Center 7.2. It does not necessarily represent the opinions, views, or beliefs of [H]ard|OCP or [H]Enthusiast in any way. The green numbers on the below screenshot represent specific issues that I have with the interface design. I spent a long time designing user interfaces for software with thousands of users across the United States. Granted, that is not a huge amount of users, and it is limited to the USA, but the experience is there, dealing with people from all walks of life and will all manner of personal perferences and comfort levels with computers.
1.) The divider between the left hand list and the right hand control set should be moveable. That would allow users to make it bigger and reduce the scrolling required to see the items in the list view. This is not something that is difficult to accomplish.
2.) The entire window should be resizeable. This, again, is not a difficult change. As a matter of fact, the default setting for new windows created in Visual Studio is resizeable, unless they specifically created this window from the dialog box template. They had to change it to make it a fixed size.
3.) The ATI Catalyst Control Center logo is useless. It takes up space, and the list view above it has to have vertical scroll bars. Users are already aware that the window they are looking at is ths Catalyst Control Center. The title bar says so. Removing this logo would allow space for the list box above it to be larger, and reduce the amount of scrolling. Sure, you can click on it and go to ati.amd.com, but why would I need to do that from here? Perhaps if the link went somewhere useful (like a download page, a support page, an FAQ page, or a CCC manual) it might be more useful, but as it is, it is not useful at all.
4.) There is no cancel button. Sometimes, users want to get into the control panel to check a setting, not necessarily change a setting. Granted, it is not difficult to click the close button on the title bar, but a Cancel button would be nice. Pressing escape would be a good way to be able to close this interface without saving any settings, but that doesn't work (yes, I checked).
5.) Tabbed interface? Why? There is only one tab? The tab control needs to go away. That would free up window real estate better used for actual controls.
6.) The list view window is too small. Scrolling around in such a small window is a serious drag. Addressing issues number 1 and 3 would help this problem.
7.) I am already aware that I am looking at Adaptive Anti-Aliasing settings. I clicked on that in the menu on the left. Why do I need a big banner to tell me what I clicked on? This is a waste of space that could be better used by something useful. If I need to be reminded of what I clicked on, I can just look on the left hand side and see.
-------------------------------------
Now, there are a few things that are good about it, especially in version 7.2. First, they have obviously dropped the oh-so-snazzy silver theme and real-time rendered blurry car driving down a blurry street. It loads faster...a lot faster. That is probably because it's not loading the MDX runtimes to support the aforementioned blurry car and blurry street. It loads so fast now that now I question the need to have a splash screen for it. It just flashes on the screen for a split second and goes away. The splash screen used to be useful, as it told you that the CCC was loading, in case you had forgotten whether or not you actually clicked on it. Now, it could be eliminated altogether and I don't think too many users would lose much sleep over it. Also, the 3 CLI tasks that used to run to provide the "service" have been reduced to 1.
The preview is nice, and better than it used to be. I applaud their effort to show the difference that these settings can make, individually. However, I still question the need. Are there a lot of users changing AF or AA settings who don't already know what these settings do?
-------------------------------------
Then there's this:
I got this error message while I was playing a game. The CCC was not open. The game did not crash. Apparently, just the Catalyst Control Center Host Application crashed. It chucked me to my desktop to tell me about it. When I dismissed the error message, I went back to the game and played without any problems. Lame. What good is reducing your thread count, if the thing is just going to crash?
-------------------------------------
I don't expect ATI to care what I think about it. I certainly don't expect them to change anything just because I think it stinks. I just felt the need to share my opinion of a perennial problem. Thanks for reading.
