ATI Catalyst Radeon Display Driver 4.6 (Windows 2000/XP)

Performance Improvements

As with most CATALYST™ releases performance has increased in various situations. The following performance gains are noticed:

• Pixel Shader compiler improvements bring significant performance gains to PS 2.0 applications such as Halo (2-3%), Tomb Raider (4-5%) and Mother Nature (4-5%). ShaderMark 2 shows numerous gains in the 3-6% range. The High Dynamic Range scenes in ShaderMark (Tests 20 & 21) gain 10-15%.
• RADEON X800 driver tuning improves performance for several Vertex-Shader-heavy tests. For example, Battle of Proxycon, Troll's Lair and Mother Nature gain 9-15% on the RADEON X800 PRO.
• Improvements in our surface allocation and texture management code have increased performance for resource-challenged cases. Re-Volt scores improve 25% at 1600x1200 across several RADEON configurations. ShaderMark Test 14 (Veined Marble) improves dramatically (up 380% at 1600x1200) on some 256MB products.
• Improvements in OpenGL driver efficiency bring numerous small gains (1-3%) in Call of Duty, Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory, Star Trek - Elite Force II, Serious Sam, Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Quake III Arena.
• X800 memory tuning improves Anti-Aliasing performance in a number of games and benchmarks. For example, at 4xAA, 3DMark2001 gains 4-7%, UT2003 Antalus and Asbestos Flybys improve 2-7%, and the CodeCreatures score rises 15%.

Issues Resolved in CATALYST™ Version 4.6

The following section provides a summary of the issues that have been resolved in the latest release of CATALYST™ 4.6. These include:

• Resolved CATALYST™ Driver Issues
• Resolved Game Issues
• Resolved Application Issues

Resolved CATALYST™ Driver Issues

This section provides information on CATALYST™ driver issues that have been resolved in the latest release of CATALYST™. These include the following:

• Display corruption is no longer seen when rotating the primary desktop 90 degrees or 180 degrees under Windows 2000 with extended desktop enabled
• Display corruption is no longer seen when running the ATI demo Dolphin v1.1 with the Truform option set to Application Preference
• The operating system no longer fails to respond when doing a monitor swap while running an overlay image on the secondary display
• Rotating a display of 1024x768 60Hz followed by entering standby mode no longer results in display corruption being seen briefly when resuming
• Using the ATI icon in the system tray or using a hotkey stroke to rotate the display image no longer results in the operating system intermittently failing to respond for approximately 90 seconds
• Playing a DVD with DXVA enabled and attempting to rotate the display 90 degrees no longer results in the operating system failing to respond
• Moving an OpenGL window around the Windows desktop no longer results in the operating system intermittently failing to respond

Resolved Game Issues

This section provides information on game issues that have been resolved in the latest release of CATALYST™. These include the following:

• While playing the game Halo, under certain conditions, images that should be hidden behind solid foreground objects are no longer showing through
• Starting a game of Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow under Windows XP with an ATI RADEON 9000 PRO installed and the display set to 1024x768 and the graphics quality set to high no longer results in flickering textures
• Display corruption is no longer seen when using particular air craft in "Century of Flight" games found in Flight Simulator 2004
• Textures are now applied correctly in the game Silent Storm when setting the resolution to 1024x768 32bpp and the quality option set to high
• Enabling AF to 8x and running the game Battlefield Vietnam with the graphics set to high and the display set to 1280x1024 32bpp no longer results in display corruption being seen at a certain point of the game
• The display menu for the game 4x4 EVO 2 is now available when the rotation option is used to set the display to 180 degrees
• Circular grid corruption is no longer seen when launching World Fables under Windows XP with Anti-Aliasing enabled at 4X
• The Windows XP operating system no longer intermittently fails to respond when restarting the game Homeworld 2
• Adobe Gamma and other colour calibration software now have the ability to adjust their independent gamma values. Note: In certain situations when closing the application, the default desktop gamma is not restored.

Resolved Application Issues

This section provides information on application issues that have been resolved in the latest release of CATALYST™. These include the following:

• The wireframe in edit UVWs is now drawn correctly after zooming in on an object in 3ds max
• Running Solidworks 2004 under Windows XP and dragging the grapicstest2004.sldprt window to a secondary display no longer results in the planes being highlighted after the mouse is moved off the plane
• The Solidworks 2004/SP3 application no longer fails to respond when opening the shaderstest.sldasm test with Real View enabled
• Enabling extended desktop followed by setting the display resolution to 1280x1024 on the secondary display adapter no longer results in the application ProEngineer terminating

Note: Before proceeding with your driver installation we suggest you make sure you are installing the latest version available and for the appropriate model/revision and Operating System. We strongly suggest following 'readme' instructions for installing drivers when available. Often restarting your system will be necessary for the new driver to become active and start functioning properly.

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