Looking Back: ATI's Catalyst Drivers Exposed

Unreal Tournament 2004

As UT2003 and UT2004 are near-perfect substitutes for each other, we went with Epic's latest version of their best-selling multi-player FPS in order to put the 9700 Pro up against 2004's more refined engine. UT2004 is a good example of a near-modern game, utilizing some SM 1.x features, along with being the engine of choice for many more games, including America's Army. With the number of games built on the Unreal Engine 2.x, UT2004 represents an important engine to optimize for, given the era.

Here, we see almost no performance difference among the Catalyst drivers without AA/AF, with the performance actually dropping just a bit between the 3.00 drivers and later drivers. Enabling AA/AF, however, shows a more positive picture with a near-20% performance improvement between the 3.00 and 3.04 drivers, and a little more of a pickup after that.

Catalyst 5.11 versus 3.00 (mouse over to see 3.00)

Looking at the screenshots, you'd be hard pressed to find a difference in image quality between the 3.00 and 5.11 drivers, and it's the same story for all of the other Catalyst versions.

Other than improving AA/AF performance, it seems that ATI had little need to optimize for UT2004. Without a performance or IQ difference, there is little to say about the 9700 Pro with regards to UT2004.