3.4 catalyst verses the rest !

Don't rely on synthetic benchmarks, like Shadow Lady has said, they're no good. 3d Mark has a +/- 200 point error for me every time I run it with exact same configurations... and if you've read the news on DH's mainpage, about the 350 mhz machine doing as well as a 2.8 ghz machine in 3DMark03, you'll see how much of a crappy program it really is.

 

Actually, i'm rather happy that's it can do be ran on a slow cpu...

AFTER ALL, it is specifically built for VIDEO only in mind.... (hence 3DMARK)
Sysmark is used for the other stuff....

If a radeon 9700 is put into 2 machines... one being the 350 and the other being the 2.8.. and they score within 250 points of each other....i'd say that they've hit the right spot for making a benchmark that tests the video card.... not the entire system....

 

3.4s

still do not have any evidence that 3.5/3.6 are more efficient than 3.4, anybody have any examples of apps that are better with the later drivers

 

Well then that would explain it, wouldn't it. If they are removing the speed optomizations, then logically IQ should go up while FPS goes down.

But wait, that doesn't explain my situation. Every time I update to a newer driver version, my speed in Morrowind loses 3-4 fps. Doesn't seem like alot, but remember, Morrowind ran very slow to begin with. They're doing something very wrong with these newer versions, because I'm a nature buff who notices little things, and not only is it getting slower, but my textures are getting fuzzier. I had to enable AF just to get the textures looking crisp again.

I'm about to go start a new thread, since I don't want to hijack this one for a Morrowind question.

 

Going from 3.4 to 3.5 to 3.6, I've noticed that there seems to be some slow down in most of the games I play. This includes JKII, America's Army, and the Mechwarrior4 series. In MW4: Mercs, on several of the maps, there is a 50% max drop in frame rates. In America's Army, I went from a high of about 70-80 fps to a high of about 40 with the 3.6's (and this takes into account changes going through the various updates to it).

As for image quality, in MW4 there is a lighting problem that I have been watching to see if there is a situation where the problem doesn't occur to find out if there is something not associated with the driver.

I refuse to use benchmarking programs.

Oh, and the above numbers are from having an ATi 9500 Pro using DX9.0a through all of this.

 

ditto... honestly.. look at the new bugs 3.6 still has.. link

 

so I have i..

 

I agree!!

 

Well..

You say 3.6 has lots of bugs.. all the drivers have bugs.. that's why they update, to fix bugs, software will ALWAYS have bugs, as will hardware, it's a fact of life..

 

3.4s Still Rock !

Seems like noone has a qaulified good word to say about 3.5/3.6,

The most important item in any game whether its FPS, sim/arcade racing.RTS or whatever should be the input from the player (otherwise you may as well watch a DVD)

Performance is crucial for the input to make good effect of the game-(FPS)

Quality of image is secondary(no good having a great image and no FPS) and is largely determined firstly by the game itself and its engine, like,
Rubbish game engine=rubbish performance and quality and the system makes the most of it.

So I cannot see the point in the 3.6 driver, which apparently may give a better quality,if it lowers the FPS so that you have to turn down all the detail levels to get it back to the 3.4 performance standard.

I am convinced that something has turned upside down somewhere and although I am looking forward to the 3.7 I wont be surprised if the 3.4s still rule the roost !!!

 

Well after my post 3 weeks ago I decided to give omega's 3.6 a try again. After two week I was back to 2.4.43. No matter what anybody tells me, I still feel the image qualify is better than 2.4.74a. By the way, I finally ran 3DMark and got better scores with the latest driver than I did with 3.4. So my machine goes against the grain on both fronts.