Usage & Impressions

Besides the retooled visuals, the interface is much cleaner compared to the previous ATI Driver Control Panel. The navigation in particular is much cleaner. Gone are the thirteen tabs and submenus. Settings such as AA, AF, mipmapping are not API specific any longer; changing one of these settings affect both OpenGL and D3D based games.

The default Standard View for the Control Panel is geared a lot more towards the beginner - a lot of the options are abstracted from the end user. For example under the Standard 3D View, there is only a single slider bar that has Performance and Quality with 5 different positions with no indication of what each notch is doing. The advanced view is much better with a tree view of all the options much like the Nvidia setup.

The 3D Preview Window does a good job in showing the effects of different graphical settings like the application of AA and AF. Users can get nearly instantaneous feedback for what AA does for example without having to leave the driver control panel. As previously mentioned, these settings are abstracted in the standard view which I think goes against helping casual end users understand what the various settings do and ATI should seriously consider starting the default view as the advanced view. Another alternative can be a prompt during driver installation so the user can decide which view they want.

The Hot Key feature is pretty cool and makes it possible for me to axe another program that is resident in my system tray. I used to have problems getting a proper gamma level in some games without resorting to an external program and this helps a lot. It is interesting to note that the hot key functionality provides shortcuts to set the graphics between the performance setting as well as the quality setting. I suspect that ATI may add hotkeys to toggle AA/AF and some of the other graphical features in the future.

User assigns their own hotkey

The ability to customize the CCC is a big plus to the gaming community in general. The popularity of WinAMP and Litestep themes available are a testament to this. The SDK allowing developers to add plugins into the CCC should make things pretty interesting also. An example might be a developer customizing the 3D Preview to show the affects of AA/AF on their particular game. Or have games that do not support AA like Splinter Cell or Halo automatically disable AA if it is on. Many of the overclocking tools can probably be integrated into the CCC more seamlessly. The possibilities are pretty limitless in that regard and it is great to see that ATI has recognizes that the community has a lot to offer and in turn, giving them an avenue for which to innovate.

Despite a lot of strengths, there are several areas of improvement that should probably be addressed. The skinned CCC is a bit of the pokey side. Setting the skin to the system skin seemed to speed things up but the main standard view menu seems to still be a touch on the slow side. The application profile manager could use some improvement also - instead of the autodetection that Nvidia employs in their application specific profile, the application profile settings need to be launched from within the game or the settings need to be activated in the system tray icon.