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Some more about Catalyst AI... |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 22 September 2004 |
Had you talked to ATI about the notion of application specific optimisations last year they would have likely suggested that these can be fragile, and generic optimisations are not the most stable route to take. However, when the competitive landscape gets a little closer, and even significantly exceeds in some high profile cases, these types of policies inevitably need to be rethought, especially when the competition has an open policy allowing for application specific optimisations. So, now, ATI are (re)introducing the notion of optimising performance where generic optimisations can't meet the needs to the particular application or engines rendering requirements...
ATI's new Catalyst A.I. technology is able to improve 3D application performance by almost 30% under Doom 3 without taking anything away from the overall gaming experience (image quality!).
Catalyst A.I. PowerPoint
The application specific detections are done by looking for by the exe name and ATI are keen to stress that they are applied for performance and/or bug fixes. The applications ATI are currently detecting are: Doom3, UT2003, UT2004, Half Life 2 Engine, Splinter Cell, Race Driver, Prince of Persia and Crazy Taxi 3 - some of these titles were actually already detected by ATI's drivers since they have a bug with operating with AntiAliasing and ATI have disabled AA operating on these titles. ATI are also keen to stress that only application where the end user will get some benefits will be optimised - benchmark only applications should not be targeted under Catalyst AI.
The way ATI have bundled both the application specific optimisations, and texture analysis slider is a little clumsy, however we suspect there was an element there that was designed to encourage users (and reviewers) not to disabled it - indeed ATI suggest that users shouldn't disable Catalyst AI since not only will they be loosing performance, but application compatibility and stability may reduce. Clearly, on the strength of Doom 3, there are rooms for performance improvements with application detections and optimisation, however hopefully ATI will stick to its insistence of no IQ loss. ATI have listened, as well, and offered what users have requested since they learnt of ATI's generic texture optimisations by providing them with the ability to remove these optimisations.
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