Catalyst 5.12 Optimisations Article and Interview with ATI's Phil Roger

jmke · 14th December 2005, 16:29

Just under a week ago ATI released their 12th Catalyst Driver for 2005, Catalyst 5.12. As well as the normal performance enhancements that you would expect and the usual spread of bug fixes... ATI also bundled what could prove to be quite a useful feature in the future. Dual core CPU optimisations. Due to a particular NDA being delayed we had the time over the weekend to look at the 5.12 drivers and see what exactly ATI was offering in terms of Dual core improvements...

Driverheaven: How do the driver optimisations differ between AMD and Intel CPUs - if at all?

Phil Rogers: Currently we use the same multithreading path for both AMD and Intel. I suspect that your question comes from seeing larger gains on Intel for some applications. The optimizations are equally effective on both CPUs, but we tend to hit graphics hardware performance limits sooner on AMD due to their faster single core performance.

One other thing to note on this is that our multithreading path is also enabled for Intel's Hyperthreading. Again it is the exact same path. Naturally we see a smaller gain for hyperthreading vs dual core, but its nice to deliver some value from this work to the large installed base of HyperThreaded PCs.

http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/dualcore512/

14th December 2005, 16:29	#1
jmke Madshrimp Join Date: May 2002 Location: 7090/Belgium Posts: 79,021	Catalyst 5.12 Optimisations Article and Interview with ATI's Phil Roger Just under a week ago ATI released their 12th Catalyst Driver for 2005, Catalyst 5.12. As well as the normal performance enhancements that you would expect and the usual spread of bug fixes... ATI also bundled what could prove to be quite a useful feature in the future. Dual core CPU optimisations. Due to a particular NDA being delayed we had the time over the weekend to look at the 5.12 drivers and see what exactly ATI was offering in terms of Dual core improvements... Driverheaven: How do the driver optimisations differ between AMD and Intel CPUs - if at all? Phil Rogers: Currently we use the same multithreading path for both AMD and Intel. I suspect that your question comes from seeing larger gains on Intel for some applications. The optimizations are equally effective on both CPUs, but we tend to hit graphics hardware performance limits sooner on AMD due to their faster single core performance. One other thing to note on this is that our multithreading path is also enabled for Intel's Hyperthreading. Again it is the exact same path. Naturally we see a smaller gain for hyperthreading vs dual core, but its nice to deliver some value from this work to the large installed base of HyperThreaded PCs. http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/dualcore512/ __________________