I'm wanting to know if the new catalysts are any good, so I did some benchmarks.... I used aquamark3 and 3dmark2003 v3.2.0, DirectX 9.0b My system is not the greatest, but seeing as I do not even have a budget it's pretty good: P4 2.53Ghz 512 Mb 266Mhz DDR RAM Some crappy MSI mobo Gigabyte Radeon 9200SE 64 MB (Apparently the core is 200Mhz and the memory 400Mhz, but 3dMark reports both as 114.5Mhz?) Anyway - on with the results: Cats 3.6 739 3Dmarks 8882 Aquamarks (960 GFX) Cats 3.7 742 3Dmarks 8909 Aquamarks (963 GFX) Cats 3.10 740 3Dmarks 8911 Aquamarks (963 GFX) Hmm, not very conclusive... I'll also see if I can get and benchmark the 3.9 Catalysts. I will not touch the 3.8s with a 10 foot pole because of all the reports of really bad performance and damaged hardware. If someone else could perform some benchmarks on these drivers with some better hardware (or even better, give me some better hardware) I'd be interested in seeing the results. [edit] My mobo only supports 4x AGP, which is annoying becuase the 9200SE is an 8x card...
Your graphics card is totally limiting you system scores, drivers will not give much more performance. The card has very little decent hardware to work with. My brothers computer. AMD 2800XP Barton @ 166x12.5 = 2083Mhz (Stock) DDR400 @ DDR333 cas 2.5 VIA KT600 Radeon 9800 Pro 3DMark2001 SE : ~ 15860 3DMark2003 Ver 340 : ~ 5460 Aquamark3 : ~ 38000
My brother can not redo the benchmarks with the older drivers as he is happy with his current setup. He has benchmarked all the drivers since the ATI 3.6's. There have been slight fluctuations in scores some increases but not massive. The ATI CAT 3.8 and above are well worth using because of an HyperZ enhancements some games which use Z-buffering in certain ways get a approx 20% increase. This will not be highlighted in the bechmarks but some game engines will see an increase. We reccomend the ATI CAT 3.10 because they seem to give us the best performance up to now and fix quite a few game compatibility issues.
XP1800+ Palomino @ 1533mhz 512mb Corsair XMS 3500+ Epox 8RDA+ Nforce 2 Radeon 9800 Pro @ 400/720 and i'm pulling around 6000 on 3DMark2003 Ver 3.4.0 so something looks a bit odd there ^
Your overlcock of the 9800 Pro would give that bit extra score in 3D Mark 03. You have over clocked you card by 5% in core and you score is about 8% faster, that looks about right to me. The card has been tested with custom Fillrate and Pixel Shader testers it is running the theortical maximums exactly as a ATI 9800 Pro should. Also my brother is running fairly un-agressive memory settings on the DDR 400 @ 333. The memory could be pushed a fair bit more but he does not see the need to really.
fairy nuff although this thing gets very hot, Hercules have put a very slow fan on to make it quiet but i've rigged and extra 80mm underneath it for uber coolage could do with something blowing on the top side however...
