Cat 7.7 drivers released (7-19-07)

Unless they seriously improved AA performance, why release more AA levels :rolleyes:
 
ZerazaX said:
Unless they seriously improved AA performance, why release more AA levels :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Because it's time to measure gaming performance in SPF? :p
Sadly, having to use shader units to perform AA means the 2900 will almost always play second-fiddle to the 8800's in situations when traditional AA is applied - and dang if that isn't the reason most people buy a high-end card. It's not like it does it inefficiently - the D3D10 benchmarks floating around show G80 taking just as much of a hit when running shader AA. So, unless game developers are writing better AA algorithms than the Catalyst driver team...;)
I still don't believe this was a design choice - 'forward-looking' my arse, just admit the hardware broke and there was no time to fix it. Although I suppose the term does make a certain amount of sense - when the big guns from the green and red teams are racing together, it's not often the 2900 is looking behind to see how the competition is doing :D
I couldn't design a graphics card to save my life, but NOT having a hardware AA resolve in the render back-ends seems such a glaring mistake to me that ATi surely wouldn't have chosen this route. Especially considering ATi cards since the 9700 have hauled ass in this respect. The HD2900 would be an attractive product if it could apply AA without crippling shader performance. I'm confident that R650/R700 will bring them back in line, but also that driver updates will not bring the R600 up to snuff.

Having said that, I'd be interested to see how much further the edge-detection filter degrades performance and if it can be enabled without applying any normal AA. Effectively providing 3xAA by the look of things, although the release notes only show it as an option when selecting 4x and 8x modes.
 
ugh...I take a performance hit.obilvion.splinter cell nose dive.might as well check the others...Quake4 I quit
 
R.E. the new AA modes, I wouldn't use Custom Filtering in the first place since it blurs everything, while producing smoother edges it has the consequence of negatively impacting IQ on everything else.
 
My performance in Two Worlds with the X1950pro (AGP) is almost halved, going back to the previous version now.
 
so is this the thread wherein everyone talks about the great performance increases with the new ati drivers???

oh... :rolleyes:

good thing these cats weren't out of the bag before the last 2600 review. yikes!

...but wait a minute... do they improve anything? there's gotta be something in their lineup that got better with this release.

there's no noticeable improvement for me and my x800pro... but it's been at the top of its game since around december 04, if you ask me.

earthsim does not count as an improvement.
 
My 3dmark 06 score went from 5144 to 5211. My system specs are in my sig.
 
I get noticeable increase in Quake 4 and Halo 2. Does anybody have a link to 7.6? I'd like to do some benches.
 
I went from 81 fps in CS:S stress test to 61 fps. I ran it three times on each just to be sure. It also had some seemingly random jerkiness in places with 7.7
 
I tried these out on a PC with an X700. It ran like absolute crap - the screen was visibly refreshing and the CPU was pegged by task manager and firefox. I rolled back the drivers and boom, it was fine. Even the windows animations for the menus was horribly slow. It was my mother's PC, and I didn't think she wanted a FPS problem in solitaire, but with the 7.7s it was literally that bad :O. Earlier drivers worked fine, so it could just be the age of this particular card, but it might be that they are just buggy. Note I wasn't even using the CCC, I just got the drivers.
 
ZerazaX said:
Unless they seriously improved AA performance, why release more AA levels :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

cause we can get 24x AA for 4x AA with about 75% of the original performance with the new edge detect filter method, best of all this method doesn't make things look blurry (I took some screenshots and compared it to Box in Halo 2), too bad it doesn't support 2x AA yet, otherwise we'd be getting 12x AA for the performance of 75% of 2x AA, wth is wrong with ATi
 
Sorry for the misinformation, I had my cpu OC'ed when I ran my second benchmark. But anyways, at stock with 7.6 my 3dmark06 was 5144, with 7.7 it was 5149. So not really much of an increase.
 
Yes, my FPS performance also decreased quite noticably in multiple games. Company of Heroes and Call of Duty 2 were most noticable. BF2142 seemed unaffected. I reverted back to 7.6 drivers and all is speedy again.

I'm running an x1900gt on a dual-core proc.
 
An interesting tactic. Drop performance in one release, then bring performance back up to previous levels the next release, creating the illusion of a substantial and impressive boost.

No thanks, AMD. I'm not sure if that's what we need.
 
I highly doubt that's their true intentions with this driver...

but wtf? ATI has always dropped very dependable drivers on us, why this crappy release?
 
Everything is running smooth and speedy with 7.7 on my old x850xt pe on both my systems

seems all the performance hits are on higher end cards.
 
phide said:
An interesting tactic. Drop performance in one release, then bring performance back up to previous levels the next release, creating the illusion of a substantial and impressive boost.

No thanks, AMD. I'm not sure if that's what we need.
Click to expand...

Lol, eventhough the tactic is "interesting", the person who thought that the performance drop is a tactic is more "interesting" to me... I don't think that AMD is dumb enough to use a performance drop as a tactic and think that people won't notice the drop but it is really funny when someone think that the drop is an illusional tactic :rolleyes:
 
that seems pretty unrealistic to me. seems like a release as normal. But if they were marketing the next release as something then okay. But just releasing drivers that might not be anything amazing doesn't seem like a tactic. Maybe these were more for 24-2600s *shrug*
 
After reading all the comments about reduced performance, I decided to do some light testing of my own. I started with 7.7 installed. Just the drivers and no CCC, I'm using ATi Tray tools instead. My card is an x1900XT, and all benchmarks were done at 1680x1050 resolution.

7.7, installed a few days ago:

Quake 3 Timedemo with AA, AF, and everything else maxed:
292.5

F.E.A.R.
45 min
85 average
197 max

Company of Heroes
72.1 Average
141.7 Max
27.1 Min

So then I uninstalled 7.7 and installed 7.6

Quake :
293.2

F.E.A.R.
45 Min
86 Average
197 Max

Now here's the interesting part:

Company of Heroes
56.3 Average
61 Max
28.7 Min

COH performance went down when going back to 7.6? I read 7.7 was supposed to be worse. So, I uninstalled 7.6 and went back to 7.7. FEAR and Quake 3 performance were exactly the same again, but here's COH:

56.9 Average
62.1 Max
27.8 Min

So, I'm confused. I don't have my card overclocked or anything, so performance shouldn't have changed that much. Maybe COH changed my settings when I went in the second time.

Anyway, 7.6 and 7.7 don't seem to have any difference to me in these 3 games if you exclude the one time COH performed better for some reason. My tests were very limited though.
 
This new release hosed my Windows setup totally, that I had to do a system restore.

They symptom with mine was, when I turned on the computer to login to Windows, it would say Profile corrupted, and it would have to recreate one each time I started the computer up.

So I lost all my settings on all my programs, everything was completely reset, basically pissed me off.

Thankfully, system restore kept all my stuff, cause it deleted some of my important data on my desktop.
 
Wow, I'm sorry. That's just crazy.

And forget what I said in my post. Somehow Vsync got turned on. Maybe something weird with game profiles in ATI tray tool.

I'll have to go test 7.6 again.
 
I upgraded the driver to Cat 7.7, hoping that I can get some excitment, but after launched CSS, everything became ugly comparing to Cat 7.7; then I went to checck the Video setting, I was very supprised that the AA was disabled, there was no any AA option available(even no 2XMSAA), the only word under AA option I saw is "NONE".

After I rollback the driver to Cat 7.6, the things recover, AA option can be tuned to 6xMSAA as it was.

Do you have guys have similar problem on Cat 7.7?

My System is
AMD Althlon 64 x2 4800+
2G DDRII 667
PowerColorful 1950Pro 256M Cross Fire
Windows Vista Ultimate 32bits
 
Ther eare numerous little things wrong with this release. I know for me, I'm getting some odd colors on DVD's played with Media Center in Vista. The new 'Edge-Detect' AA tries to implement itself in Media Center, as well. I did a clean reinstall of Vista (hey, it was scheduled for this weekend anyway) and performance was much better than a 7.6 uninstall/7.7 install sequence. But in fact, any driver where you must do that is a stillborn one. I've been a very vocal proponent of ATI here, but even I am beginning to eye some Nvidia cards. I'm too busy for this shit, and all of us don't need such wastes of our time and money. I can take the hit if this cards a dud in the end, but for many here, this card was their budget for a long while. ATI needs to break into their cycle with fixes when they have them, and not keep people waiting until the end of August. On a lighter note, lost planet will run now where it wouldn't before. (31snow/35cave, for those interested)
 
Alright, I tested again. My benchmarks were between 72 and 75 FPS each time, but it was different every time, regardless of driver version. I'm really not seeing any difference between the old and new drivers for anything. I guess I'm just lucky or something. Of course, I'm still using XP and I'm not on Vista. Tweaktown claimed XP performance was degraded though. hmmm.
 
for what its worth my COH numbers are 1024 everything maxed 2x aa 8x at default vid card speeds

48.6
76.6
11.7

CSS 74.5

DOOM3 63.6 High quality game settings

7.7 cats vista UL
 
CoH with 7.6
Avg-41.2
Max-61.0
Min-2.8

CoH with 7.7
Avg-41.0
Max-60.0
Min-2.9

CSS with 7.6
96.81

CSS with 7.7
98.18

x1800xl at stock clocks with a e6400 cpu also at stock. Not much of a difference in my main games.
 
They fixed the starcraft bug and the Call of juarez shadow bug in Vista, but SC still doesn't work in XP
 
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