Introduction



A lot of people are using Videocards powered by an ATI-chip. Most of them are using the latest drivers, some of them are using some older ones because they believe they will get better performance out of them.

To test which driver is the most performant, I took every Catalyst Driver from the 3.4 to 3.9 through some 180 benchmarks run in total, using different applications and games, I hope you'll find this roundup usefull!

All test were made on the following system:

• ECS K7S6A motherboard
  
• 512 Megabyte DDRAM PC2700
  
• AMD Athlon 1800XP
  
• Soundblaster Live 1024!
  
• Club 3D Radeon 9600 Pro kindly provided by Loveno
  
• Windows XP Professional (clean installation with all updates and drivers)
  

The following procedure was used to test every driver:

• Install Driver and reboot.
  
• Install Control Panel and reboot.
  
• adjust screen resolution to 1024x768 at 100mhz refresh rate.
  
• Run Benchmark and reboot
  
• After all benchmarks are run, deinstall driver and control panel and reboot to safe mode
  
• Remove all remaining files with Driver Cleaner and reboot
  

For the specific setting of each benchmark just look at the top of each page.

Now on to the benchmark frenzy !!!