ATI Interview: Vista/DX10 Driver Development

[GTaudiophile]

One thing that NVIDIA had to deal with in their driver development that ATI didn't have to publicly is support DX10. Because none of the currently available ATI hardware can run DX10, the Catalyst driver development is on-going at the company. Thanks to NDA's in place on the next generation R600 hardware that will undoubtedly support DX10 and Vista, ATI wasn't able to share a whole lot on the status of Catalyst software for DX10, but they were very up-beat about it.

The ATI Catalyst DX10 driver was developed by a separate, but parallel, team of software engineers that started work sometime after the DX9 Vista driver team began their work. ATI would like us to trust in their software development cycle by indicating their Vista driver was ready on time and that so will their DX10 Vista driver.

While I can't say much about the upcoming R600 hardware itself, there is little hiding that the products are coming soon and with a big trade event coming up in the March time frame, it might be a good time to release a new GPU. Maybe. But in any event, ATI's Makedon says that if any DX10 titles are available with the R600 launches that his team will be ready with a driver for the R600 for them. ATI even kind of gave NVIDIA the benefit of the doubt by saying that without DX10 titles for gamers, there really wasn't much point in harping on them about their lack of a DX10-ready driver. Man, how often do you see that??

Read More Here!

 

[LittleNemoNES]

wow ATI must be in EVEN MORE worst shape than nvidia on DX10 drivers

I hope DX10 will not turn into a huge fiasco.

 

[crazydingo]

Windows: ATI > Nvidia
Linux: ATI < Nvidia

 

[BFG10K]

MSAA adaptive aliasing is coming - I was right. :thumbsup:

 

[tuteja1986]

I want NVIDIA to release a better DX9 support certified driver like ATI did. I don't care about DX10 because DX10 isn't available and no game out right now supports it.

 

[noping]

Originally posted by: crazydingo
Windows: ATI > Nvidia
Linux: ATI < Nvidia

QFT...one can only hope that with the assimilation of ATI into AMD (generally Linux-friendly) will come some Linux-friendly drivers (or documentation to write a free driver).

 

[LittleNemoNES]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
MSAA adaptive aliasing is coming - I was right. :thumbsup:

It's already available using "ATMSharpenmode 1" and "EATM 1".

I'm using it right now. I get 60+ fps in BF2 with 14xAA. Adaptive AA is off. Noticeable performance increase. Before it sometimes dropped to 30 fps in places where there was a load of grass/trees.

Works well for all my games -- even oblivion! Before turning on Adaptive AA was not feasible (along with HDR, of course) since the performance drop was too big. Looks pretty good though fences could look better from farther away (they look nice from a medium to close distance.

I'll post some pics for you soon

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: gersson
wow ATI must be in worst shape than nvidia on DX10 drivers

I hope DX10 will not turn into a huge fiasco.

How did you come to that conclusion?

 

[LittleNemoNES]

Here are the pics:
Adaptive AA is off -- only EATM and alphasharpen are being used (14xAA and 16x'hq'AF)
They're big (~2mb each) but I hate using jpegs when talking about Image Quality.

BF2 png: http://rapidshare.com/files/16602383/BF2.png.html
FEAR png: http://rapidshare.com/files/16602888/FEAR.PNG.html
Oblivion png: http://rapidshare.com/files/16603224/Oblivion.png.html

 

[Roguestar]

PNGs need more love! Lossy compression go to hell!

 

[BFG10K]

It's already available using "ATMSharpenmode 1" and "EATM 1".

Yes I know but in the past I was telling people EATM is akin to multi-sampling TrAA but some didn't believe me.

Now with ATi's announcement they will believe me.

 

[jim1976]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
ATI even kind of gave NVIDIA the benefit of the doubt by saying that without DX10 titles for gamers, there really wasn't much point in harping on them about their lack of a DX10-ready driver. Man, how often do you see that??

What does the writer imply? How often do we see common logic being applied?
Now that I'm thinking this over, not so often..