Catalyst AI, good or bad?

[mrhuggles]

in the grand scheme of things, does it ever actually help compatibility or goodness? i dont really care about adding performance nearly so much as compatibility, i run Ragnarok Online, and still to this day the 2900 drivers give little odditys graphicaly, i usualy run with catalyst AI off, but if i run with it on or off it doesnt seem to change much, i noticed with it off it seems to do some effects in some games differently, like in portal it makes the refections move less realisticly with the player ick, but does it do anything for compatibility in older games at all?

[Silverel]

lol, the 2900 is a bit of overkill for RO, dontcha think?

Try Omega drivers, I've become something of an advocate for them lately. They tend to fix things you'd never know were broken.

[AsRock]

i leave it off for all my games..

[acperience7]

I never notice much of a difference in my games. At best I have seen 3 extra fps. In Halo PC it makes no difference.

[mrhuggles]

LOL yeah huh, as for the omega drivers, they have been unacceptably horrific for me, maybe cuz my motherboard or something? i dont know why but every time i even look at the omega drivers my chipset drivers need to be reinstalled, and perma hose my video drivers till i reinstall windows, kinda made me wanna cry lol, i had been useing the omega drivers in the past, the nvidia ones

[Deusxmachina]

I looked this up not too long ago and it was said that leaving it on doesn't seem to hurt anything but leaving it off can have the card not do certain processing that is designed for some games, which you already found out in Portal. I leave it on.

[mrhuggles]

im saying having it on in portal makes it not proesses things [it does it right when its dissabled]

if anyone is curious, im talking about the reflection on transparent things like in the very begining when your looking at the glass, the reflection is stationary sorta, and with it dissabled it moves around when you move

altho it was in advanced i neglected to test it in normal

[Spirou]

I never notice much of a difference in my games. At best I have seen 3 extra fps.

Three extra frames per second just from wearing no pants? Maybe we get another extra two or three leaving off the shirt. I'll have to check that.

[DaMulta]

AI is optimization per game in ATi list of stuff.

If they can make a game run better, or fix a game issue it is done with AI.


Turning it off can be very bad in some games, and in other it will not effect it as much.

It's best to run it in advanced, unless you are running CF in which you run it in standard. Advanced can give you graphical errors with CF.

If you turn it off in 3dmark expect to lose some points:)

[Sasqui]

OK, dumb question - do you turn it off in CCC? I have an older game that simply won't work with more recent CAT drivers, immediate BSOD.

I can't remember the last version that it worked with - it was the version available when the HD2900Pro had just come out.

Oh - it's "Motocross Madness 2" - I still love it and so does my 7 yr old ;)

[Darknova]

AI is optimization per game in ATi list of stuff.

If they can make a game run better, or fix a game issue it is done with AI.


Turning it off can be very bad in some games, and in other it will not effect it as much.

It's best to run it in advanced, unless you are running CF in which you run it in standard. Advanced can give you graphical errors with CF.

If you turn it off in 3dmark expect to lose some points:)

Now that's interesting, because I read that both Off and Advanced were not recommended at all because of issues they caused. I've always left it at Standard because that's what I'd read was the best setting...

[DaMulta]

Most issues with CCC are with forcing AA on in games.



Or as in quake 4 you need to pick the highest setting, then click let application decided before it would take that level of AA in game. (only some games do that)

[Darknova]

Most issues with CCC are with forcing AA on in games.



Or as in quake 4 you need to pick the highest setting, then click let application decided before it would take that level of AA in game. (only some games do that)

I never force AA on...I tend not to use AA tbh so that's never been an issue.

What exactly does AI Advanced do over Standard?

[DaMulta]

driverheaven


So that brings us to today, we now have a beta build of an upcoming ATI driver which features the Catalyst AI functionality (Catalyst Control Centre only). The basic idea behind Catalyst AI is that it gives the end user the option to completely disable the optimizations in ATI's driver should they feel its necessary.
For those of you interested in specifics, Catalyst AI uses ATI's Texture Analyzer technology (R9600 Series and R4xx series) to optimize performance in any Game/3D application. What about support for older boards? Ati have responded with the following: "We fully support CATALYST A.I. on all R3XX hardware. In fact the R3XX series of products will see an even larger performance boost in Doom 3 than the RADEON X series of products."
ATI believe that whilst doing this they maintain the correct image quality and in some cases can even improve IQ. Cat AI does this by analyzing individual textures as they are loaded in order to choose the best and fastest way for them to be displayed. Settings available to the user are Off, Standard and Advanced. By default the drivers are set to Standard. In most cases Standard should be sufficient as it uses less CPU overhead than Advanced and its up to the end user to decide which option works best on their system in each particular game or application. There should be no IQ difference between the two settings however in games where there are frequent texture loads or when using a slower system the extra computations may cancel out the performance increases gained by using the Advanced algorithm.
As well as the texture optimization algorithm there is a second aspect to Catalyst AI and that is the application specific optimizations and tweaks. Examples of these application specific items are forcing Anti Aliasing off in the driver for Splinter Cell or Prince Of Persia because AA doesn’t work in those titles. ATI have informed us that they will never specifically detect a synthetic benchmark with Catalyst AI optimizations however some benchmarks may see improved scores due to using game engines that have improvements within the driver. ATI have also guaranteed that they will only optimize if they can do so without any reduction in Image Quality.
Just to be clear, disabling Catalyst AI disables application specific optimizations, bug fixes and generic optimizations.

[Darknova]

Interesting, thanks.