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This is a review courtesy of "Postill's Extreme Computer Services" 
This review is about the differences between the official ATI Catalyst drivers and the "Tweaked" Omega drivers that are said to be far superior.
The drivers i used in this review are the latet availiable at the time i used them (about 5 minutes ago) so should be as accurate as possible. Bear in mind, however, that the Omega driver used (2.5.5.1) is a tweaked version of the PREVIOUS catalyst counterpart, and not the more recent Catalyst 4.7. Confusing i know... lets get on with it.
TEST SYSTEM
Motherboard: Abit IC7-G
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.01GHz Standard Voltage, SP94 Cooled
Memory: 2x256Mb OCZ PC4200 DDR533 Cas 2.5 (2.5,6,3,3) RDA Disabled.
Hard Drives: Dual S-ATA 80Gb 7200rpm 8Mb Cache (Raid 0 strip size of 32Kb intel cont.)
Video Board: Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 pro @ 405.00MHz Core + 351.00MHz Mem
PSU: Antec Tru-power 400w
Standard drives: (Sony DVD writer, Samsung CDRW, Floppy Drive)
O/s: Windows XP Home Edition - Service Pack 2
I tried to be as accurate i could be doing these tests. I ran Norton's "one button check up" before doing it and rebooted.
3Dmark was run on its default settings and Direct3D settings were set to Balanced for optimal performance and quality.
The Omega driver was tested first and here are the results.
That is not a bad score! with older drivers and the same setup, the scores were around 5700/5800!!
Ok, I then removed the Omega Drivers, Restarted the Computer, installed the new catalyst drivers, restarted, made sure the same programs were closed/running so everything was identical bar the version of driver installed.
Here are the results from the Catalyst drivers.
That is not a bad score either BUT the OLDER omega driver beats it by a fair amount!
Here is a straight comparison between the two drivers.
So there is a fair difference though not a massive one but that coupled with the fact that the omega driver is OLDER and also that the Omega ones are specifically meant to improve image quality and NOT frame rates then they are pretty darn good in my opinion!
I therefore reccomend the Omega drivers to anyone with an ATI card though there are nVidia Omega drivers too. They can all be found at www.omegadrivers.net and there are other interesting things there too.
I hope that this has cleaned up any confusion or misunderstanding about the two drivers and their levels of performance.
Take Care, Thanks for reading,
Chris
edit: it seems i was wrong!! new drivers were released less than a week ago (omega) so i will get to benchmarking them right now!!
Here are the results for the latest ones!!
As you can see, they are not as good as the previous ones. This may, however, just be an inaccuracy on the part of futuremark. Had i had more time, i would have run benchmarks for each driver 3 times and then worked out the average but i could not do that.
Use these as rough guides then i guess...
Chris.
This review is about the differences between the official ATI Catalyst drivers and the "Tweaked" Omega drivers that are said to be far superior.
The drivers i used in this review are the latet availiable at the time i used them (about 5 minutes ago) so should be as accurate as possible. Bear in mind, however, that the Omega driver used (2.5.5.1) is a tweaked version of the PREVIOUS catalyst counterpart, and not the more recent Catalyst 4.7. Confusing i know... lets get on with it.
TEST SYSTEM
Motherboard: Abit IC7-G
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.01GHz Standard Voltage, SP94 Cooled
Memory: 2x256Mb OCZ PC4200 DDR533 Cas 2.5 (2.5,6,3,3) RDA Disabled.
Hard Drives: Dual S-ATA 80Gb 7200rpm 8Mb Cache (Raid 0 strip size of 32Kb intel cont.)
Video Board: Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 pro @ 405.00MHz Core + 351.00MHz Mem
PSU: Antec Tru-power 400w
Standard drives: (Sony DVD writer, Samsung CDRW, Floppy Drive)
O/s: Windows XP Home Edition - Service Pack 2
I tried to be as accurate i could be doing these tests. I ran Norton's "one button check up" before doing it and rebooted.
3Dmark was run on its default settings and Direct3D settings were set to Balanced for optimal performance and quality.
The Omega driver was tested first and here are the results.
That is not a bad score! with older drivers and the same setup, the scores were around 5700/5800!!
Ok, I then removed the Omega Drivers, Restarted the Computer, installed the new catalyst drivers, restarted, made sure the same programs were closed/running so everything was identical bar the version of driver installed.
Here are the results from the Catalyst drivers.
That is not a bad score either BUT the OLDER omega driver beats it by a fair amount!
Here is a straight comparison between the two drivers.
So there is a fair difference though not a massive one but that coupled with the fact that the omega driver is OLDER and also that the Omega ones are specifically meant to improve image quality and NOT frame rates then they are pretty darn good in my opinion!
I therefore reccomend the Omega drivers to anyone with an ATI card though there are nVidia Omega drivers too. They can all be found at www.omegadrivers.net and there are other interesting things there too.
I hope that this has cleaned up any confusion or misunderstanding about the two drivers and their levels of performance.
Take Care, Thanks for reading,
Chris
edit: it seems i was wrong!! new drivers were released less than a week ago (omega) so i will get to benchmarking them right now!!
Here are the results for the latest ones!!
As you can see, they are not as good as the previous ones. This may, however, just be an inaccuracy on the part of futuremark. Had i had more time, i would have run benchmarks for each driver 3 times and then worked out the average but i could not do that.
Use these as rough guides then i guess...
Chris.
Last edited:
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