Last week ATI released a new version of its Catalyst software. The latest ATI Catalyst 5.12 graphics card driver along with usual performance enhancements and bug fixes sports optimizations that take advantage of dual-core and multi-threaded processors. DriverHeaven.net has investigated performance impact of the optimizations in several popular game titles, namely Battlefield 2, FarCry and Half-life 2.
?In order to see the theoretical increases possible with the dual core driver we need to test at some very specific settings so that it is our CPU that causes a bottleneck in our test system. The settings we are going to use today are 1024x768 with no AA or AF. When you pair that with our test system its pretty easy to see that the GFX card wont cause any bottleneck at all,?indicated the author.
With interesting benchmarking results at their hands, DriverHeaven.net asked Phil Rogers,
ATI senior software architect and the man responsible for ATI's performance enhancements and dual-core work, to comment.
?The D3D driver interface delivers work to the driver in large batches, encoded in an execute buffer. It is the driver's job to parse this execute buffer, translate it to a form that our hardware can process and deliver it to the hardware. With the dual core optimizations, we move the bulk of this driver processing to a worker thread that runs on the second core,?explained Phil Rogers.
- DriverHeaven.net: Catalyst 5.12 Dual Core CPU Optimizations.
