Graphic Cards ATI produce tool to increase Doom3 scores 'up to 35%' with AA enabled

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ATI produce tool to increase Doom3 scores 'up to 35%' with AA enabled

ATI Technologies have this morning made a tool available to HEXUS which supposedly improves scores in most OpenGL games when antialiasing is enabled at high resolution. Improvements 'of up to 35%' in Doom3 are explicitly mentioned by sources within ATI. The tool seemingly changes the way the graphics card maps and accesses board memory to better deal with handling AA sample data.

As well as supporting Doom3, the tool is said to increase performance in all OpenGL titles when using antialiasing. With Doom3 the poster child for that graphics API, ATI's willingness to promote the increases in that application in particular are understandable.

The fix will shortly be rolled into CATALYST 5.11 according to ATI sources and a beta drop of that driver will be made available for testing in due course, before the final WHQL driver from Terry Makedon's CATALYST team is made available for public download in November.

benchdoom3composite5dz.png


Conclusion
The tweak also shows gains similar to Riddick's in the Serious Sam 2 demo using the OpenGL version of Croteam's renderer, so OpenGL performance is generally up quite healthily across the board.

Overall the programmable nature of the new memory controller in the majority of ATI's new graphics chips means that over time and with enough analysis, per-application changes can be made to the memory controller to optimise memory access by any given application at any number of resolutions, allowing ATI to extract the most out of their hardware.

The largest single functional block on the new GPU silicon, the memory controller - chiefly architected by ATI's Director of Technology, Joe Macri - is one of the two large keys to unlocking the performance of the new hardware. Future driver releases from ATI may show other large gains in other games, not just in OpenGL.

The memory controller on NVIDIA's latest GPUs is also programmable to some extent by the driver, to tweak certain parameters pertaining to memory access, although it remains to be seen if they have similar ranges of performance headroom to find in their own products.

Just goes to show hardware is nothing without good software. Driver development and release schedules just got interesting again.
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Source
 
Also what an ATi employee posted @ b3d http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=595463&postcount=155

sireric said:
This change is for the X1K family. The X1Ks have a new programmable memory controller and gfx subsystem mapping. A simple set of new memory controller programs gave a huge boost to memory BW limited cases, such as AA (need to test AF). We measured 36% performance improvements on D3 @ 4xAA/high res. This has nothing to do with the rendering (which is identical to before). X800's also have partially programmable MC's, so we might be able to do better there too (basically, discovering such a large jump, we want to revisit our previous decisions).

But It's still not optimal. The work space we have to optimize memory settings and gfx mappings is immense. It will take us some time to really get the performance closer to maximum. But that's why we designed a new programmable MC. We are only at the beginning of the tuning for the X1K's.

As well, we are determined to focus a lot more energy into OGL tuning in the coming year; shame on us for not doing it earlier.
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Wow ! The X1800XT beating the 7800GTX in Doom 3 !!!

Nobody expected that I guess ;)

Will nVidia's release 80 drivers *fix* the problem ?
 
Anish said:
Wow ! The X1800XT beating the 7800GTX in Doom 3 !!!

Nobody expected that I guess ;)

Will nVidia's release 80 drivers *fix* the problem ?
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From the article
HeXus said:
Adding in results for NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX running the 81.84 driver show that with the memory controller tweak an ATI product can overtake NVIDIA's flagship single-board SKU for the first time since Doom3's release.
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And more interesting stuff
sireric@b3d said:
This is independent (completely) of D3D -- D3D has a different driver and different MC settings systems. Though, there are lots of D3D improvements coming up too...
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Link to the Fix?? :(...

Oh 4get it, its not released as yet. I hope ATi does something with the "Partially Programmable" Memory Controller on my x800 xl :(.
 
Hmm, for the X1k family only... What about the old 9800pros and the x800s??

Nway, this sounds like another blow for the 7800 series family coz Doom III has been their strong point, if the news is to be totally believed!!

Also, suprising, this news comes out just before the Quake 4 launch...;)
 
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