Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Released in 2003, Jedi Academy represents the pinnacle of what the Quake3 engine could offer. With massive levels, dynamic glow, and lightsabers abound, it's one of the most punishing Quake3 engine games ever made, and a good representation of the vast number of games made in the early 2000's with this engine. As our only OpenGL title in this roundup, it's also our gauge to see if ATI's OpenGL performance changed at all over the 3-year period That said, even with ATI's traditionally poor OpenGL performance, we still had to increase our testing resolution to 1600x1200 in order to put a sizable dent in to our test setup; otherwise, we would continuously hit the 100fps frame rate cap.

As the Quake 3 engine was already 3+ years old at the time of the earliest drivers, it should come as no surprise that there is not much variation to speak of here either with or without AA/AF. Even with that, we can see that ATI still managed to work in one significant performance improvement in between the Catalyst 3.00 and 3.04 driver sets, with a 10% frame rate increase. The numbers are a bit more mixed with AA/AF enabled, but even here, the peak performance difference is a very noticeable 14%.

Looking at the screen captures, however, we see a very interesting story that the benchmarks do not show, and it's not all performance related.

Catalyst 3.04 versus 3.00 (mouse over to see 3.00)

The performance improvements that we saw between the 3.00 and 3.04 drivers appear to have been completely free, as there is no difference between the two images. Comparing the 3.06 and 3.09 drivers, however...

Catalyst 3.09 versus 3.06 (mouse over to see 3.06)

Unlike the earlier comparison, there is a very noticeable IQ difference between the 3.06 and 3.09 drivers, but looking at our charts, there is no such difference in performance. This is a prime example of how drivers aren't just about performance improvements, as the IQ difference is the result of a bug fix by ATI with dynamic glow. On drivers previous to 3.09, the JA team had to use a hack to get around a bug in ATI's drivers, causing the inferior image quality seen above. These hacks are not used in drivers 3.09 and later, and as we can see, ATI was able to fix the bug without a performance hit. There was no further change to IQ after the 3.09 drivers.

Overall, however, Jedi Academy shows that other than early improvements and a bug fix, there was little change in performance in this game with the 9700 Pro.