ATI's Catalyst 3.8 Drivers: ATI Sanctioned Overclocking
by Derek Wilson on October 8, 2003 3:02 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Turning up the Heat
With any system that involves overclocking (factory regulated or otherwise), we are going to want to know it’s stable. To try to push the system, we ran the Final Fantasy XI benchmark on a loop for about 2 hours, followed by a run of X2 at the highest settings possible, then we hit it with GunMetal and finished off with TRAOD.
Tomb Raider is our most intensive test here, as when all the options are set all the way up, with no compression on anything, 6x AA, at 1800x1440 we squeeze out just about 9 frames per second.
Everything ran smoothly and beautifully. There were no stability issues or problems with the graphics.
Of course, that brings us to the next question we have to ask. Since the card overclocks itself based on heat, how does it respond when we heat it up?
To test this, we ran our "kill -9" TRAOD test a couple times to raise the temperature of the card as high as we know how to get it without a blow torch. We then reran the Aquamark3 and Unreal benchmarks. Here's what we saw:
The Aquamark3 score dropped from 47.62 to 46.78
The Unreal score dropped from 135.42 to 132.47
Of course, the performance should never drop below that of the stock clock speed, as the chip will never clock it self that lower than that. What this does mean is that as you are playing a graphically intensive game, your cards performance increase from overdrive will degrade over time.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
62 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
#31 was a reply to # 28.Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
are you telling me that your going to play HL2 , in DX8 at 640x800 on your Fx ? to get decent framerates ?Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
Nice of you to warn us ahead of time #8.It does take one to know one.
So in your esteemed opinion, what are all the current GF FX card owners to do?
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
i am a little disappointed with the overdrive feature as well...i was all exicted too about the possibilities...and certainly expecting more than just a 1.5fps difference :(Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
#26 said: ""TombRaider AOD , the only DX9 game benchmarked is 3 1/2 times faster than Nvidia.ATI 42 fps , Nvidia 12 fps.
WoooW.
Imagine HL2.""
Do0d, TRAOD has nothing to do with HL2. Also, NV is playable at lower resolutions than 16x12. And any card will fly with PS2.0 off...
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
...I'm honestly struggling to work out why CM hyped these up as the best Catalysts ever. We knew these weren't going to be performance drivers, but the new features are gimmicky (overdrive/smartshader) or not as good as they should be (game profiles, but you have to manually switch them, bah!). Oh well, some bug fixes are at least nice.A somewhat disappointed 9800 Pro'er.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
TombRaider AOD , the only DX9 game benchmarked is 3 1/2 times faster than Nvidia.ATI 42 fps , Nvidia 12 fps.
WoooW.
Imagine HL2.
I'm impressed, If Cat 3.8 bring more stability, that should be good enough for ATI owners.
a Gforce2 mx owner.
AgaBooga - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
#24, ATI would have had to implement special temperature measuring devices. I wonder how the bios flashing will respond to this...Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
sucks like 0.1% of gamers or market have the 9800TX why not do it with 9700pro or 9800projust a though ...............
Anonymous User - Wednesday, October 8, 2003 - link
#20,You got your roman numerals backwards.
VIII is 8
IX is 9
X is 10
XI is 11
XII is 12
XIII is 13
XIV is 14 and so on