New ATI Driver UI: The Catalyst Control Center

Final Words

ATI got on the right track when they started the Catalyst series of drivers, and we are seeing the first big steps beyond the Catalyst driver with the Catalyst Control Center. The 3D preview alongside each setting is nothing short of revolutionary in terms of making very complex functionality intuitive. Whenever we have to go back and explain Anisotropic filtering and Antialiasing, we have difficulty getting across exactly what the settings mean visually, even if we can communicate exactly what's going on in the hardware. Perhaps we should write a little java script to have the AA or AF setting change on an image when a slider is moved the next time we need to go there.

The profile manager is very functional, and very powerful. Making the actual profile the focus (rather than the executable for which it is intended) allows for more freedom and a cleaner feel. Overall, the interface is very clean and intuitive.

We are not a fan of skinned windows, rather preferring consistent look and feel to unique window shapes and decoration, but this is admittedly a preference issue. There is a kind of "windows-ish" skin included in the CCC, but it doesn't do as good a job as we would like (it's just off enough to fit in worse than the default skin). But on the upside, users can create their own skins as ATI uses Stardock for skinning.

We only have a few real complaints with the Catalyst driver and Control Center combo right now. We really want to see the option to adjust how much trilinear filtering that it does. It would also be nice to have the option of setting anisotropic filtering to always use trilinear. As far as the Control Center goes, we would like to see the option to run a lower profile, non- .NET version, for those out there who know exactly what they want and don't care for all the bells and whistles. Perhaps ATI could continue to offer their current control center with future drivers and offer users a choice (with the default being the new CCC). We would also like the default skin to be a standard Windows XP skin that actually looks like WinXP. Currently, the Catalyst Control Center only works with R3xx and R4xx based cards, but upcoming versions will support older hardware as well.

Our final thought is that the Catalyst Control Center fits in very well with what consumers need from a graphics driver UI in order to get the most from their card. The features offered are well suited to both new users and seasoned GPU aficionados. Now, all we need is for ATI and NVIDIA to take some cues from each other and come out with something like a "ForceALYST" that combines the low level and extensive control of ForceWare with the intuitive, easy-to-use UI of the Catalyst Control Center.