The ATI Catalyst driver suite has come a long way over the past few years. Starting out as a troubled and often unstable and buggy set of drivers it is now as good, if not better than the competing Nvidia drivers. For ATI graphics card users, in terms of features, stability and performance the Catalysts only have one true competitor: the Omega drivers.
The Omegas are a custom-made driver set developed by a guy named 'Omegadrive' and they have become very popular among ATI graphics card owners. It is important to understand however that the Omega drivers are actually based on the Catalyst drivers themselves, of course with lots of tweaking. However any significant underlying problem in the Catalysts often comes through in the Omegas, since Omegadrive does not rewrite this code. Contrary to popular belief – and with all due respect to Omegadrive and all the good work he does – the Omega drivers are not some magical driver set which resolve all problems and perform much better than the Catalysts, nor are they purported to be. They are an excellent set of drivers for ATI users, however there is another alternative for those of you yearning to customize drivers to suit your exact needs.
For those of you willing to get your hands a little bit dirty, you can use the official Catalysts and do your own tweaking. There are several benefits to this: it lets you choose your own level of performance and image quality. It lets you see what tweaks are being applied. It lets you troubleshoot problems and resolve graphical anomalies. So in a nutshell it lets you optimize and stabilize the official drivers to suit your system perfectly. This guide covers such tweaks and optimizations, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
This guide is more than just about how to perform a few advanced tweaks with the Catalysts. Whether you use the official Catalysts or the Omega drivers, this guide will help you out. It covers the entire driver installation, setup, troubleshooting and tweaking process from start to finish. From descriptions of important video-related BIOS settings to advice on what other drivers are necessary for optimal graphics performance, how to install and set everything up, how to clean your machine out of older drivers and devices, benchmarking, overclocking and easy-to-understand descriptions of graphics options such as Triple Buffering and Temporal Antialiasing. If you're an Nvidia user, jump over to the Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide instead for the same type of advice and tweaks for your graphics card.
So get cracking - read the guide and get graphically optimized!
