ATI Catalyst 5.12 Dual-Core Optimizations Examined & Explained

[TechZ]

excerpt:

Last week ATI released a new version of its Catalyst software. The latest ATI Catalyst 5.12 graphics card driver along with usual performance enhancements and bug fixes sports optimizations that take advantage of dual-core and multi-threaded processors. DriverHeaven.net has investigated performance impact of the optimizations in several popular game titles, namely Battlefield 2, FarCry and Half-life 2.

“In order to see the theoretical increases possible with the dual core driver we need to test at some very specific settings so that it is our CPU that causes a bottleneck in our test system. The settings we are going to use today are 1024x768 with no AA or AF. When you pair that with our test system its pretty easy to see that the GFX card wont cause any bottleneck at all,” indicated the author.

Full story: xbitlabs.com (http://www.xbitlabs.com/web/display/20051215222254.html) | driverheaven.net (http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/dualcore512/) (full article)

-Its about time the end-user who's been buying Dual Core CPU's got their moneys worth, seems though that the Pentium D CPU's got the most benefit from the benchmarked applications. Its still not enough, but its a start :thumbs:

[confus-ed]

..Its about time the end-user who's been buying Dual Core CPU's got their moneys worth, seems though that the Pentium D CPU's got the most benefit from the benchmarked applications. Its still not enough, but its a start :thumbs:

To get benefit from multiple processing points, you need to write code that takes advantage of it - so for direct3d apps (as there's no opengl optimisation apparently) that's just what ATI are doing here - I guess that there's never really been enough product base with this capability to make it worthwhile to do the re-writes to the drivers before .. its all a part of the usual we've got the fastest card stuff though !

[TechZ]

To get benefit from multiple processing points, you need to write code that takes advantage of it - so for direct3d apps (as there's no opengl optimisation apparently) that's just what ATI are doing here - I guess that there's never really been enough product base with this capability to make it worthwhile to do the re-writes to the drivers before .. its all a part of the usual we've got the fastest card stuff though !
Well for now were more looking to "I've got the Dual Core chip" which is what you cannot use to its full potential. But graphic cards at the top end are usable for todays games (ok maybe only 75-90%) but at least more so than processors. The way I buy/upgrade my computer every few years, I would get a Dual Core cpu now, so that I dont have to upgrade later on, but thats just me :)