James Bannan29 January 2007, 5:52 AM
No sooner is Vista released than ATI has its first official Vista driver ready to go. Read on to discover what ATI has in store for Vista users.
To coincide with the official release of Windows Vista (at least, the home consumer versions), AMD has today released the first official ATI Catalyst driver for Vista – version 7.1.
One of the big features of Catalyst 7.1 is that it introduces HD DVD and Blu-ray support into Vista. When used in conjunction with an ATI Radeon X1000-series GPU with HDCP support, Vista will happily play back either HD DVD or Blu-ray protected content, with the Radeon card accelerating the motion compensation and in-loop deblocking components of the H.264 encoding on the card itself.
When playing back H.264-encoded content at 1080i or greater, an X1600-series or better GPU is recommended. This feature in the Catalyst 7.1 driver is fully supported by Cyberlink and Intervideo.
At the moment HD DVD/Blu-ray playback is only supported on 32-bit Vista machines, but will be available on 64-bit machines with Catalyst 7.3.
Another major feature with Catalyst 7.1 is Direct3D Crossfire support for Vista. All the Radeon X1000-based Crossfire configurations currently are supported under Windows XP will now be supported under Windows Vista.
At the moment, support is for Direct3D Crossfire features – OpenGL support is planned for a future Crossfire release. Additionally, Crossfire Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) which is currently available to be enabled by default for all applications under Windows XP is not present in Catalyst 7.1. It is also planned for in a future release.
From a performance perspective, AMD have made huge efforts to bring 3D performance under Vista ever-nearer to Windows XP. To this end, it does help AMD’s cause that all the Radeon product from the 9500 series released in 2002 are officially certified for Windows Vista.
In general, AMD’s most favourable Direct3D benchmarks comparing performance on Windows XP versus Windows Vista using Catalyst 7.1 demonstrate that Vista is performing almost identically to XP in synthetic 3DMark benchmarking, and around 4%-8% slower in game benchmarking (Far Cry and Dark Messiah). Comparative OpenGL is a little harder to ascertain as Catalyst 7.1 contains ATI’s proprietary and redesigned OpenGL driver. The plan is to continue to improve the OpenGL driver with future Catalyst releases.
Looking at driver stability under Vista, AMD seems to have had the drop on NVIDIA so far, with NVIDIA Forceware drivers producing corrupt installs and a new feature – the black screen of death.
It’s no real surprise then, that AMD had the first WHQL certified driver for Vista – they’ve produced a new WHQL certified driver for Windows XP each month for the last four years
With that level of stability testing experience available, it’s no wonder that the ATI experience with Vista so far, throughout the entire beta testing phase and now RTM, has been nothing but positive.
 Catalyst Install Manager |
The driver itself has had a fair bit of an overhaul. The new installation GUI which we first saw in ATI’s beta Vista drivers has been badged as the Catalyst Install Manager. It’s only a feature of Windows Vista however – XP users will have to be content with the current install procedure.
It will also receive a future update – a Download Manager. This will enable Catalyst users to update driver components without needing to download the entire driver package, uninstall and reinstall.
Updates can be set to automatically download, and only those components which have actually changed from one driver release to the next will be downloaded.
 Catalyst Install GUI |
The Catalyst Control Center (CCC) now loads noticeably faster (it can be a bit clunky on XP, even on a high-end machine) and takes up fewer system resources.
The 3D preview window has been modified into something a bit more meaningful – the 3D images displayed are designed to highlight the exact option you’re configuring – anti-aliasing (AA), adaptive anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering.
You can also switch away from the live 3D preview to a pre-rendered 3D preview, which uses stills and close-ups to demonstrate precisely what effect your changes are having. The new CCC will be available for Windows XP users in Catalyst 7.2, and unfortunately it won’t feature the live 3D preview.
 CCC AA Live Preview |
 CCC Adaptive AA Live Preview |
AMD also has some interesting plans for future Catalyst releases, beyond the ones already mentioned.
Catalyst releases for Linux will soon feature Catalyst Control Center: Linux Edition, giving Linux users with AMD-based accelerators many of the same configuration options as their Windows counterparts.
Adaptive AA is also due to receive an overhaul, as it will be able to utilise multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) for alpha-blended textures – to date adaptive AA can only make use of super-sample AA. This has a major impact on image quality with only minor performance trade-offs.
With so many disaster stories about manufacturer support for Vista (or lack thereof), it’s nice to be able to relate some good news for hardware owners.
No doubt NVIDIA will have their own Vista plans too, and there will be some interesting times ahead as the ATI/NVIDIA war for GPU performance supremacy under Windows XP transfers to a completely new operating system.
 ATI and Vista |
With Vista’s final release breaching the horizon, it’s nice to know that if you’re a Radeon user, at least there’s one part of that precious system which won’t let you down when you upgrade.