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Behind the Mask with Optimization and Catalyst AI |
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Written by Phyro
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Monday, 27 September 2004 |
Also Anandtech has been looking at the optimizations from the ATI. Coinciding with the launch of the X700 line of graphics cards, ATI slipped a little something extra into its driver. The lastest beta version of Catalyst that we got our hands on includes a feature called Catalyst AI. Essentially, ATI took all their optimizations, added a few extra goodies, and rolled it all together into one package.
 Behind the Mask with Optimization and Catalyst AI
Optimization has been a touchy subject for quite some time in the world of consumer 3D graphics hardware. Over the past year, we have seen the industry take quite a few steps toward putting what the developers and users want above pure performance numbers (which is really where their loyalty should have been all along). The backlash from the community over optimizations that have been perceived to be questionable seems to have outweighed whatever benefit companies saw from implimenting such features in their drivers. After all, everything in this industry really is driven by the bottom line, and the bottom line rests on public opinion.
nVidia first started applying tight restrictions on optimizations last year after their issue with Futuremark. We are glad to see that ATI is embracing a move to enhance the user experience for specific games when possible while tightening up the reins on their quality control as well. We see this as a very positive step and hope to see it continue.
Over the past year, we have had ample opportunity to speak with the development community about optimizations and their general take on the situation. They tend to agree that as long as the end result is very nearly the same, they appreciate any kind of performance enhancement that they see. Since nVidia and ATI cannot physically produce the same mathematical output, they'll never have the same image appear on systems with different vendors' cards in them. But just as these two different results are equally valid under the constraints of the API used and the developer who implemented them, so can optimized results that are faster to render, but not perceivably different to the human eye.
Both ATI and nVidia want to maintain an acceptable image quality because they know that they'll be held accountable for not doing so. If it's not the API architects (who can take away the marketing tool of feature set support), then it's game developers. If it's not the game developers, then it's the end users. And the more we know about what we are seeing, the better we are able to help ATI and nVidia give us what we want. We should encourage both companies to focus on balancing mathematically accurate output optimally with pure speed to match our own perception.
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