Related Articles

Updated Catalysts

ATI has never been known to have strong performance with Open GL, and the early reviews of their X1000 showed no change from the previous generation. One of the key architectural improvments over the last round of cards though was the addition of a programmable memory controller. This addition allows ATI to make minor adjustments in their drivers to optimize for different applications. In this case, it's OpenGL.

ATI has released a public Beta of the drivers, and we have put them to the test on their as-of-yet-unreleased flagship card. We ran the card against a standard X1800 XT as well as a 7800 GTX with the latest Nvidia drivers.

Doom 3

As you can see from the graph below, the latest fix definitely delivers a performance boost over the old drivers, but it's most noticeable with full filtering on, where the X1800 XT actually beats a 7800 GTX!

Analysis

This is definitely good news for ATI in the midst of what appear to be a series of unfortunate turns with this last generation. The boost in performance is nice, but the fact that a high end ATI card clearly beats a high end Nvidia card in Open GL (by 16 frames at 1600 too!) is flabbergasting. Without filtering on, Nvidia still has the edge, but realistically, noone who owns either of these cards will be playing Doom 3 without any form of filtering on.

Being able to see these results for yourselves is the main issue currently - the fix only applies to the X1800 XT which is not even available yet. Though the drivers should theoretically only help 1800 series cards, we tested the latest update on our X1600 XT to be sure.

Not only was there no improvement, but Open GL performance actually dropped by up to 4 frames per second. ATI has a very long road ahead of them if they expect to bring the X1600 XT to market at its 249 MSRP as is. The latest driver kinks should be worked out before launch, but hopefully ATI can pull off a stunt and make a product that is at least competitive with what they themselves have in the market currently. It's not a very good situation as it stands.

Back on track! After testing the X1600 XT to no avail, we tried the latest fix on an X1800 XL. One would assume that being within the same name family as its higher end sibling, the core architecture would be the same. This does not appear to be the case though, as the latest fix did nothing in terms of OpenGL performance for the XL. As in the 1600's case, performance dropped by a couple of points instead of doing what it should have. We had our suspicions initially that there might be more differences than meet the eye between the XT and XL variants, due mostly to the large distance between scores as well as the opposite tendencies of the two in some games. This more or less confirms that unfortunately, and proves that while the X1800 XT in and of itself might be an amazing architectural accomplishment, the technologies that make it such aren't available at a reasonable price (or at all) for now.

Conclusion

On the one hand, this is fantastic news for people who are waiting patiently to get their hands on the latest and greatest from ATI, but is also discouraging knowing that the architectural improvements resulting in better Open GL performance, are only available at the top end. Hopefully ATI will still be able to work on some form of improvement for the rest of its line, but after so many years of the same old story, it doesn't look to hopeful. Regardless, for those who can afford to care, it looks like for the time being, ATI rules the roost in single card Open GL performance. Fancy that.

We're so used to waiting on ATI for a hint at more performance with the OpenGL API, but it looks like we'll be seeing where Nvidia is intending to go from here. This is just one more twist in one of the most interesting graphics battles we've yet seen.