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Omega Radeon Driver Comparison! |
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Written by Mavke
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Thursday, 04 November 2004 |
Adrian's RojakPot has send word about their newest article about a comparison on Omega Radeon & ATI Catalyst drivers. If you own an ATI Radeon graphics card, chances are you would have heard of the Omega drivers.
 Omega Radeon Driver Comparison!
While most people choose to use the official ATI Catalyst drivers, the Omega drivers were developed for users who are a bit more adventurous and are looking to squeeze the best performance out of their graphics cards. The Omega drivers were developed by Angel Trinidad as a hobby.
What makes the Omega drivers so special? Well, aside from the fact that they tweak the registry and various other settings to optimize performance, Angel Trinidad is also a member of ATI's Catalyst beta driver testing team. This means he is able to incorporate future Catalyst optimizations into his own drivers! This effectively gives Omega driver users access to future Catalyst benefits, even before the official release!
In Doom 3, the Omega driver improved frame rates across the board with no noticeable changes in image quality. However, please bear in mind that the Doom 3 environment is usually too dark to notice the fine details anyway.
Frame rates in the Counter Strike: Source VST improved quite significantly, but at the cost of texture issues with Anisotropic Filtering. If you are willing to live with a compromise in image quality to get better frame rates, or if you are happy to play without AF, then the Omega driver is worth installing. As previously discussed, the Special OpenGL mode offered no considerable benefits over Standard OpenGL, and should be ignored.
Keep in mind that Catalyst 4.10 boasts the new Catalyst AI, which has been shown to improve frame rates when benchmarked by websites like TweakTown. Although I did not record any increase in performance with Catalyst AI, that does not mean that it offers no benefits to you.
As mentioned earlier in the article, the Omega driver contains optimizations for Radeons that have 256MB of memory. I have also been talking to many gamers who swear by the Omega drivers because they drastically improved their frame rates. And as I have stated in the previous paragraph, other websites were able to record improvements with Catalyst 4.10's new Catalyst AI. Therefore, it appears that both Catalyst 4.10 and Omega 2.5.90 offer improvements in performance for different graphics cards and different setups.
Personally, I'm happy to stick with ATI's official Catalyst 4.10, with Catalyst AI disabled. The only improvement in my setup with the Omega driver installed was the better frame rates in Doom 3. But this improvement will eventually be seen in the next official Catalyst drivers anyway.
I'm not discouraging anybody from giving the Omega drivers a shot. A lot of work has gone into them and it has lots of potentially-useful features like softmodding and overclocking options. Give the Omega drivers a try. Who knows, you might get better results than I did!
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