New Catalyst 4.10 speeds in 3Dmark05

3DMARK05 MADE ATI rush with its drivers, and for the second time this year it has speeded up its driver introduction. Usually ATI is very conservative about releasing beta drivers, but you have to sacrifice some comfort for performance.

It did this with the Catalyst 4.9 Alpha driver, the one that accelerated Doom 3. Now the key goal is 3Dmark05 and how to win those wars.

The driver is called 8.07 and we are told it will be renamed to Catalyst 4.10 in a matter of days. You can get it here.

Apart from fixing some bugs with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic which occurred in Catalyst 4.9, it fixed the memory allocation problem for all of its 256MB cards.

ATI admitted to all of us that it had a nasty memory allocation problem for all of the 256MB cards that resulted in some performance losses in previous drivers. Now it has fixed the problem, and applications that can take advantage of larger frame buffers are going to benefit from that. One of them is 3Dmark05 of course but ATI doesn't want you to think that this is "a 3DMark05 specific optimization", it's just a pure bug fix.

I can see one possible thing about this sudden driver speed up. Either ATI wanted to surprise Nvidia which it sure did.

So we think ATI did wise marketing and didn't optimise. I know that many of our friends will look into those drivers and 3Dmark05 in detail, so we will let you know if they find out anything irregular about it. µ