Catalyst v Omega - The Final Showdown

[ChristopherP]

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.

 

[Techy]

nice thread chris, we could do with more test's and reviews like this, time is a major factor though i think!

if ian will pay my wages i'll quit work and write reviews full time, how about it ian? you know you want to!

are there any downsides to these drivers chris?

they must be a bit buggy?

 

[Ian]

if ian will pay my wages i'll quit work and write reviews full time, how about it ian? you know you want to!

lol, I wish I could pay myself!

Do you notice any difference in quality Chris, I'm tempted to give these a go. They've been mentioned here before, but I've never got round to it.

 

[ChristopherP]

Well im not too sure about the quality but i heard that they are engineered so that they give sharper nicer images than the standard catalyst ones...though i just played desert combat on a res. of 1920x1440@75Hz with full eye candy and there was no stuttering AND the image quality was superb! flying around the trees in an Apache killing the tanks etc...will post up a screenshot if you like...

i have noticed no difference what so ever with stability - everything runs nice and smooth so no worries.

give it a go - install them. You wont regret it.

 

[Techy]

try it ian, you can always roll 'em back!

screen shot pls chris!

 

[ChristopherP]

I have a screenshot but it is 7.91Mb - it is amazing though! If ian would kindly up the allowance to 8meg lol..

Dont know how i am going to be able to host it as my ISP says i can only upload like 2Mb image files...

its an awesome shot - will make a jpeg of it but dont expect it to be any good. Sorry for the size of it...

here it is -Desert combat (Add-on for BF1942) taken while flying a helicopter.

btw dont let internet explorer resize the image - it should be about 1920x1440!

 

[Ian]

Going to give them a go now

Chris, it might be worth downloading the paint shop pro trial from www.jasc.com, you can resize images very easily there That image should only be a 200k JPEG

 

[ChristopherP]

Its not the resizing - i can do that ok its the quality loss - you are not going to make an 8mb BMP down to 200k without losing anything!

 

[Ian]

It should still keep most of the quality if you do it on 90% quality JPEG, give it a go

 

[ChristopherP]

well open the link i posted - the blue undelined sentance... its right there!

 

[Ian]

lol, sorry Chris, I'm going mad

 

[Matt Jason H]

Interesting, i'd like to see more of these experimentation/investigation "showdowns".

 

[Reefsmoka]

You should try and get in game frames per second result chris. Like try on Far Cry and UT2004 using Fraps . Maybe if there is a decent amount of extra frame per second on the omega drivers i may jump ship to the dark side .

 

[ChristopherP]

is Fraps not that ingame recording thing? i used that to record some FS2004...it KILLED my FPS !!

not sure about FPS but it is most certainly playable without any juddering...

 

[Reefsmoka]

you can record with fraps, but its more known for its frame counting.