ATI X1600XT Video Card Review :: ATI's Catalyst

ATI has committed itself to releasing a new driver they call Catalyst every month or so. Last year Terry Makedon and company released 13 Catalyst drivers. What's more, each Catalyst driver is fully WHQLed (Windows Hardware Qualification Lab), so OEMs and AIB partners have few complaints as to driver stability and usage.

ATI introduced the Catalyst Control Center suite early in 2004 along with the release of the X800 family of cards. Up until late last year ATI made the CCC an optional driver, with older cards still able to use the old ATI Control Panel. With the release of the X1K series of cards, ATI chose to make the CCC a necessary component for the new cards.

The standard view of the CCC gives the following options in the driver control panel: Welcome, Information Center, Displays Manager, 3D and Avivo Video. The Welcome screen allows you to: Check for driver updates, Contact CUSTOMER CARE, Customer reviews, Send ATI your feedback and visit ati.com with a click of the mouse. The Information Center gives you the driver version you're using, the Catalyst version, the vendor, the 2D Driver Version, the Driver path, the Direct3D and OpenGL version and the CCC version. The Displays manager allows you to change your resolution on the fly and describes what monitor you have attached.

The 3D Tab gives you a variety of preset settings for your video card. Optimal sets your AA to application decided, AF to application decided Advanced Catalyst A.I., and one notch on the Mipmap Detail Level. The High Performance setting has the AA and AF settings to application decide, the Mipmap Detail Level to two notches. Balanced has the AA and AF setting at application controlled and the Mipmap Detail Level set at Quality. High Quality has the AA at 2X, the AF at 8x, standard Catalyst A.I, and High Quality Mipmap Level Detail. Optimal Quality has the AA at 4X, the AF at 16X and standard Catalyst A.I. setting.

The Advanced View, allows you to control each of these settings individually. Here you can also Disable Catalyst A.I., allowing the game-specific optimizations to be disabled. AA can be set anywhere from 2X-6X with up to 12X effectively available through Temporal Anti-Aliasing. Adaptive Antialiasing can be enabled from this menu as well. Anisotropic Filtering is available from 2X-16X modes. There is a new High Quality mode that is superior to the competition's AF.

ATI has a comprehensive suite of multimedia applications for all of their video card users called Multimedia Center. MMC is a suite of DVD playback software, Audio player, File Player, Video CD player and more. The X1600XT comes with the standard MMC, without such things as a FM Radio or TV functionality. ATI has recently updated their MMC to version 9.13; the last version publicly available was 9.08 from last year.

ATI clocked the card at 587MHz for the core and 693MHz for the memory. ATI set the clock speed relatively conservatively. Using ATI's Overdrive utility, I was able to overclock the card to 650MHz for the core and 756MHz for the memory. This is an over 10% overclock, not too shabby. The card was totally stable with the overclock settings, running benchmarks all day and night.