ATi Has Miracle OpenGL Hack

For THE first time in recent history ATI managed to kick Nvidia's butt in Doom 3.

It's an interesting story, but ATI engineers say they managed to find a way to use the memory better and get almost 30 percent of increase in OpenGL games.

Raja Koduri, one of the key engineers at ATI, and his team working on programmable memory controllers developed a little tweak that can result in a significant performance increase.

The tweak in driver software will help a sixteen-pipeline ATI card to outperform its twenty-four-pipe rivals that can render thirty two pixels without Z passes. Scary huh?

Our friends at Hexus managed to prove the difference. You can check their findings here

You will get noticeable performance increase in all OpenGL games and, compared with each and every driver, it will boost your performance. This driver will get you faster performance at 1600x1200 4X FSAA and 8 Aniso than Geforce 7800 GTX and this is the recommended resolution for this card.

This feature will be part of upcoming Catalyst 5.11 drivers as it takes time to validate and test all of the features and it will get it to the general public. We don’t know how this hack affects slower cards but be aware that the hack is just about two days old. µ

Article - The Inquirer

 

sounds extremely good, finally ATI has something to rival/beat nVidia, haven't seen that in a long time

 

Yes, true, but unfornately it's primarily designed for using the cards with AA enabled which i sadly can't use ATM due to my crppy card

 

What cards does this hack affect?

 

All ATi cards, but supposedly only works with AA and AF enabled together with a high resolution! When it's released i will get it and see if it actually works!

 

, this looks good, too good, i am looking forward to trying this

 

Pelvis, sorry to be a pain....

What exactly is AA or AF enabled?

Never heard the term(s).

Thanks

 

AA = Antialiasing
AF = Anisotropic Filtering
That's what they stand for but never really understodd what they do.

 

AA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antialiasing
AF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering

 

Yeah ATI really came through with this one, if you concider this update the X1800XT is a superior card, just not as cheap but what do you expect. The hack is really only useful on X700 and above cards as anything less would likely die trying to effectively enable AA and AF without sacrificing major fps.