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| FAQ: ATI Catlyst Tweak Guide |
Introduction
The ATI Catalyst driver suite has come a long way over the past few years. Starting out as a troubled and often unstable and buggy set of drivers it is now as good as the competing Nvidia drivers. For ATI graphics card users, in terms of features, stability and performance the Catalysts and the Catalyst Control Center have one major 'competitor': the Omega drivers and the ATI Tray Tools utility.
The Omegas are a custom-made driver set developed by a guy named 'Omegadrive' and they have become very popular among ATI graphics card owners. It is important to understand that the Omega drivers are actually based on the Catalyst drivers themselves, of course with lots of tweaking. However any significant underlying problem in the Catalysts often comes through in the Omegas, since Omegadrive does not rewrite this code. If you want to tweak the drivers yourself, then your best bet is to install the latest official Catalysts and then use ATI Tray Tools.
There are several benefits to this: it lets you choose your own level of performance and image quality. It lets you see what tweaks are being applied. It lets you troubleshoot problems and resolve graphical anomalies. It lets you use the latest official drivers as soon as they come out. So in a nutshell it lets you optimize and stabilize the official drivers to suit your system perfectly. This guide covers such tweaks and optimizations, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
This guide is more than just about how to perform a few advanced tweaks with the Catalysts. Whether you use the official Catalysts or the Omega drivers, this guide will help you out. It covers the entire driver installation, setup, troubleshooting and tweaking process from start to finish. From descriptions of important video-related BIOS settings to advice on what other drivers are necessary for optimal graphics performance, how to install and set everything up, how to clean your machine out of older drivers and devices, benchmarking, overclocking and easy-to-understand descriptions of graphics options such as Triple Buffering and Temporal Antialiasing. If you're an Nvidia user, jump over to the Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide instead for the same type of advice and tweaks for your graphics card.
Update: I have contacted ATI several times and asked them for assistance in keeping this guide up to date. While they don't have a problem with the guide, it seems that they're not willing to provide any support. I would suggest the lack of support is because I don't clearly favor ATI over Nvidia (or vice versa). It's a shame they can't see past their commercial interests and help in providing better customer support - the lack of ATI technical support makes updating this guide for new hardware very difficult, but I would much rather do things the hard way than write biased articles.
Note: This guide refers to the latest Official ATI Catalyst drivers Version 7.1 and includes instructions for using ATI Tray Tools. Make sure to check back regularly as the guide is updated for each new Catalyst release.
Essential Optimization
This section contains some extremely important optimization tips and tweaks you should read through and perform prior to getting to the Catalyst tweaking.
Precautions
Before undertaking any of the tweaks or changes recommended in this guide, I urge you to take some simple precautions. I know guides like this often tell you to spend hours backing everything up and that "we take no responsibility for anything that happens to your system". I also know that most people ignore such warnings, so I'll give you two quick and easy things you can do to protect yourself:
1. Backup your important data. "Important data" is stuff which cannot be replaced if lost (such as digital photographs), or would cost you a lot of time and/or money to recreate. You should do this regularly anyway, but if your backup is old or incomplete, now would be a good time to burn a new one to CD/DVD or put a copy on a separate hard drive.
2. Use System Restore to make a new restore point. To access System Restore, go to Start>Run and type "MSConfig" (without quotes). When the MS Configuration Utility opens, click the 'Launch System Restore' button, and follow the prompts to create a new restore point.
It's up to you, but I personally believe the extra few minutes you take doing the above will save you a lot of heartache if things go wrong. When drivers screw up and your system starts acting weird - and it can happen even to the best of us - it can take a lot of time to fix things. Reverting to an earlier restore point only takes a few minutes, and works much better.
Ok, now we launch straight into the actual optimization information. No more boring introductions or warnings!
Windows Settings
If you run Windows XP, the very first thing you must do is make sure your general Windows settings are optimized and correctly configured by using my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion. This 175 page guide is available as a free downloadable PDF file, and will give you more than enough information to optimize Windows and every aspect of your entire system. This alone can resolve many problems and improve performance, even without tweaking the Catalysts.
Power Supply
An often-overlooked aspect of graphics performance and stability is the power supply. Modern graphics cards require a stable source of power, and your Power Supply Unit (PSU) has the main job of providing this to all the components in your system. If you're not using a good PSU, you will have problems running your games with any stability, and you may incorrectly blame the Catalysts, or your games for this. No amount of tweaking will resolve PSU-related problems, so from the very start make sure your PSU is up to the job or you will waste a lot of time on software tweaks and settings.
So what is a "good" PSU? Well I won't go into brands or models here, as there are far too many to cover, but there are two main aspects to a power supply which will tell you how good they are for your system. The first is the Wattage. This specifies the maximum power output of the PSU in Watts, and a simple rule is that the more devices you have connected to your system, the higher the Wattage of the PSU you will need. As a rule of thumb, I recommend at the very least a 350W power supply for modern PCs. However as soon as you attach several optical drives, hard drives, case fans and various USB devices for example you will find even 350W may not be enough when combined with a power-hungry CPU and graphics card. More recent ATI cards may require 400W or more to operate correctly.
The second, and more important, but lesser known aspect of a PSU is the stability of the voltages along the +12V, +5V and +3.3V rails. That is, how close is the actual voltage being supplied to your components on these rails to the advertised requirements (i.e. 12V, 5V and 3.3V). The most accurate way to check this is to use a voltmeter, but that requires the right equipment and a bit of technical expertise. The common way for most people is to use some sort of monitoring software. Typically you will find such a utility on your motherboard's driver CD. For example, Asus motherboards come with a handy utility called Asus Probe, which you can use to monitor important system indicators like voltage and fan speed. Nvidia-based motherboards can use the Nvidia NTune Utility, and all systems can also use the basic motherboard monitoring functionality of ATI Tray Tools - see the Advanced Tweaking section for more details.
If you can't find any such software, there is a generic motherboard monitoring utility called Motherboard Monitor which runs on any brand of motherboard, and when set up correctly measures fan speeds and voltages. It is safe, free and reliable to use, however it is getting quite old now.
Use one of these utilities to check your voltages and see how variable they are. The more variation there is in the voltage over time, and greater the variation from the rated voltage for a rail - especially when you computer is under load (e.g. playing a game) - the greater your chances of experiencing crashes, freezes and reboots due simply to inadequate and/or unstable power supply to your components.
Unfortunately there are no tweaks for PSU problems. The best you can do is either unhook all unnecessary devices, or buy a better Power Supply with a well-known quality brand (e.g. Antec), and with a high enough wattage to provide you headroom for future upgrades (e.g. 480W or more). This is particularly important for recent graphics cards like the X1X00 series which require at least a good quality 480W power supply to operate with optimal efficiency.
BIOS Settings
I cannot go into all the possible BIOS Settings here, because that would take literally a guide in itself. More importantly, each BIOS is different in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I refer readers as always to Adrian Wong's excellent BIOS Optimization Guide. Scroll down that page to find the link to the free version of the guide. If you're serious about making sure your entire BIOS is optimized, and you want to know what all those weird and wonderful settings in your BIOS actually do, make sure you check the guide. Particularly relevant to the topic of this guide are the settings under the 'Graphics Subsystem' section of Adrian's guide.
To save you time, what I will do here is provide some easy-to-understand information on the most important - and most commonly misunderstood - video-related BIOS settings and terms. Remember, check the additional guides I link to for more detailed and accurate information. The information below is just a guideline based on my personal experience and research:
AGP Port: The Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) is a dedicated PCI slot for your graphics card. It's the place where most modern graphics cards "plug in" to the motherboard. This port provides the interface between your graphics card and the rest of your system. When people talk about AGP settings, they are essentially referring to settings which affect your graphics card and the speed with which it "talks" to the rest of the system. Some older graphics cards are PCI graphics cards, and some newer graphics cards use PCI-Express (don't confuse the two), and hence don't use the AGP port or AGP-related settings.
AGP Speed (1x, 2x, 4x, 8x): This setting determines the data transfer rate (speed) of the AGP Bus - the pipeline along which video information flows. As logic suggests, the higher the speed setting, the higher the potential performance of your graphics card. However what is counter-intuitive is the actual performance difference between the various AGP modes. AGP 8x is not twice as fast as AGP 4x, which is not twice as fast as AGP 2x - and so on. The reason for this is that the higher modes provide more bandwidth - that is, the size of the pipeline effectively gets bigger. But if at AGP 4x the pipe is already bigger than the size of the information flowing through it, increasing the pipeline by going to AGP 8x will clearly not make a large difference to speed. Importantly, lowering the AGP speed (e.g. from 8x to 4x) can help improve stability for some systems (especially overclocked ones), and can also resolve some graphics problems. Generally I recommend setting this to the highest available speed in the BIOS, as long as your graphics card also supports that AGP speed (See ATI Control Panel/ATI Control Center sections). For most systems the performance difference between AGP 4x and AGP 8x is at most around 5-10%.
AGP Aperture Size: This setting determines the allocation of physical RAM for use by your graphics card, should it become necessary. A better description can be found in this AGP Aperture Size FAQ. To decide how big it should be keep in mind the following: (1) keep it above 32MB, as an Aperture Size below 32MB will disable AGP texturing - reducing your performance greatly in games; (2) the greater the amount of Video RAM on your graphics card, the smaller this setting should be; (3) Values between 64MB and 256MB show no real performance difference; and (4) Using larger values can result in more crashes such as General Protection Faults and potential texture corruption. So with all of these in mind, I recommend an Aperture Size of 128MB for most modern graphics cards. If you have an older 32MB graphics card, set the Aperture to 256MB. If you experience a large number of crashes or texture glitches, try lowering the Aperture to 64MB regardless of your Video RAM amount.
Fast Writes: This setting, whether in the BIOS or in the Catalyst Control Panel/Control Center (See ATI Control Panel/ATI Control Center sections below), is meant to speed up AGP read performance. In practice however it is known in almost all cases to have no noticeable performance impact, and indeed often causes many problems such as crashes and general system instability, especially on overclocked graphics cards. My personal testing has shown it to have literally 0% impact on performance on several different setups. Therefore I strongly recommend disabling Fast Writes in the BIOS (if available) and also disabling it under SmartGart in the ATI Control Panel/ATI Control Center for optimal stability with little or no performance loss.
Sidebanding: This setting controls a method whereby additional new video requests are sent along with the main video information, in effect working alongside the main data channel. This increases bandwidth, which can improve performance, although not by much. In practice Sidebanding can cause instability, particularly on overclocked graphics cards. Sidebanding is usually enabled on most ATI graphics cards, and shouldn't be causing any problems, however if there is a Sidebanding option in your BIOS, and you are experiencing problems, you can try disabling it to see if it helps.
PCI-Express: AGP (See above) is at present the most commonly used interface between your graphics card and the motherboard. However PCI Express (PCI-E) is a new interface which is fast replacing AGP. For a detailed description of it and what it all means, read this excellent PCI Express Overview. In simple terms PCI-E graphics cards work faster and smarter than current AGP graphics cards, but you will need both a motherboard with a PCI-E interface and a PCI-E graphics card to take advantage of these improvements. If you are considering upgrading your system, you should seriously consider getting a motherboard with PCI-E and a PCI-E graphics card to maximize performance and provide the potential for future upgradability.
Crossfire: In response to Nvidia's SLI technology, ATI has introduced Crossfire multi-GPU technology. You can read more about it here, but basically what it does is use two ATI graphics cards to form a single super-card on your system, thereby using both their power to increase your performance. Crossfire differs from SLI technically, because SLI requires driver and game-specific enhancments to make full use of its power, while Crossfire promises performance improvements in all games and 3D applications because of the tiling method it uses. In practice the difference is not necessarily major.
Remember, refer to the BIOS Optimization Guide for more BIOS setting descriptions. Take the time to optimize your entire BIOS if you can, since incorrect settings in the BIOS will cause problems no matter how much you tweak the software.
Motherboard Drivers
If you are having problems with graphical anomalies when running games, or with system freezes, reboots, General Protection Faults, or even if you're simply not able to set your graphics card to the highest AGP mode chances are you have not installed the latest (if any) motherboard drivers.
Just as your graphics card has drivers which control how it behaves, your motherboard needs drivers which control among other things how the AGP port communicates with your graphics card and vice versa. The reason for this is that there are different types of graphics cards and different types of motherboard chipsets, and each has its own nuances and needs. The correct and latest drivers for both your motherboard and graphics card help ensure that they communicate efficiently and with stability all of the time.
Identify the chipset brand used on your motherboard, and download and install the correct drivers. Note that most of the driver packages below contain more than just AGP drivers, but now would be a good time to update all your motherboard drivers, so install the package(s) recommended for your motherboard's chipset:
# For Intel motherboards, download and install the latest Intel Chipset Software, also known as the "INF Update Utility". You should also download and install the Intel Application Accelerator if you use IDE hard drive(s), or the Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition if you have a RAID drive setup. Alternatively, install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager for RAID setups on recent Intel chipsets.
# For VIA motherboards, download and install the latest VIA Hyperion Drivers. To find out more about these drivers, read my VIA Hyperion FAQ.
# For Nvidia motherboards, download and install the latest NForce Drivers.
# For SiS motherboards, download and install the latest SiS Chipset Software. Note that there are several separate SiS chipset drivers - they don't come in a unified package. You should only download and install the drivers which support your particular chipset. This means the AGP and IDE drivers for all chipsets, and the SATA/RAID drivers for chipsets which have SATA and RAID support.
If you don't know what chipset your motherboard uses, check your motherboard manual and look in the 'Specifications' section for a brand name (i.e. Intel, VIA, SiS or Nvidia). If you still can't determine the chipset, download the free 'Lite' version of SiSoft Sandra, install it and under the Hardware section run the Mainboard module and look at the Chipset type. You can also run the 'Displays and Display Adapters' module for more details about your graphics card and current settings. If you are still stuck, go to the Benchmarking & Stress Testing section of this guide and download a program called 3DMark, install and run the program and click the Details button on the main screen. Then under Motherboard Info, click on the 'System Devices' item and check the brand of all the items listed underneath. That will show the chipset type of your motherboard.
The next section wraps up the essential optimization tips, and once again should not be skipped.
Essential Optimization (Pt.2)
Before Installing Drivers
Before we move on to installing any drivers, there are two important Windows XP system settings which you will need to alter. These are the 'Driver Signing' and 'Startup and Recovery' settings.
Driver Signing
Most drivers are WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) certified. This means Microsoft have run some tests to ensure they meet certain requirements for running on Windows XP, and digitally signed them to say so. The Nvidia Forceware drivers are usually WHQL certified. However the truth of the matter is that drivers which aren't WHQL certified and signed are not necessarily any worse or more troublesome than WHQL ones. Whenever you try to install a driver which is not WHQL certified, Windows XP will warn you or even try to block your attempts. To disable this annoying setting, go to Start>Control Panel>System and under the Hardware tab select the 'Driver Signing' button. In the Driver Signing Options screen, select the 'Ignore' option, and tick 'Make this action the system default'. Now you can install any driver you wish, without XP attempting to stop you. If you do get prompted about driver signing, you can choose to continue with the installation of the driver. Of course, you should make sure you trust the source of the drivers you want to install, but any official or 'official beta' graphics drivers from ATI should be fine to use. Try to avoid unofficial/leaked beta drivers as they often have unresolved bugs.
Startup and Recovery
One of the biggest problems people have when experiencing crashes is that Windows XP by default automatically reboots your system whenever a crashes occurs. This doesn't give you enough time to look at the error message. To disable this functionality (highly recommended), go to Start>Control Panel>System and under the Advanced tab select the 'Settings' button in the 'Startup and Recovery' section at the bottom. In the Startup and Recovery screen, under the System Failure section untick the 'Automatic Restart' option. You will now see precisely what error message Windows generates when it has a major problem. You will also need to disable VPU Recover for optimal diagnosis of errors (See ATI Control Panel/ATI Control Center sections below). For solutions to common problems, see the Troubleshooting section in this guide and also refer to my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion for descriptions of common Windows error codes.
Microsoft .NET Framework
If you are going to install and use the latest ATI Catalyst Control Center (See ATI Control Center section below), you must first install the latest Microsoft .NET Framework. Download the .NET package and install it, and then make sure to visit the Windows Update site often and check for any additional updates for .NET regularly. The .NET package is absolutely necessary if you want the ATI Control Center to work correctly.
If you're wondering what the .NET Framework is, and why it needs to be installed for the ATI Control Center to work, Microsoft says this:
The Microsoft .NET Framework is a platform for building, deploying, and running Web Services and applications. It provides a highly productive, standards-based, multi-language environment for integrating existing investments with next-generation applications and services as well as the agility to solve the challenges of deployment and operation of Internet-scale applications. The .NET Framework consists of three main parts: the common language runtime, a hierarchical set of unified class libraries, and a componentized version of Active Server Pages called ASP.NET.
So basically ATI has decided to use the .NET Framework as the platform for developing the Catalyst Control Center functionality. .NET is not required by the graphics drivers themselves, it is required for the Control Center. .NET allows developers to easily program in more functionality in the driver's user interface, especially for Windows Vista.
Of course there are downsides to this for us users - such as an incredibly bloated startup process and background memory usage. If you have installed the .NET Framework primarily to use the new ATI Control Center, you can disable two .NET aspects to reduce your startup time, reduce resource usage and still have no impact on the functionality of your system or the ATI Control Center:
1. Go to Start>Run and type "Services.msc" (without quotes). In the Services dialog box, if you find the '.NET Runtime Optimization Service' then set it to Disabled. If you find the service 'Windows User Mode Driver Framework', set it to Disabled, however note that some media players like Windows Media Player 10 require this service to remain enabled if you want to synchronize with a hardware media player.
2. Go to Control Panel>User Accounts and select the aspnet_wp ASP.NET Machine Account, then choose to Delete it. This account is only necessary if you do development work using the .NET Framework. Alternatively you can delete this account by going to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Local Users & Groups>Users and disabling the ASPNET account. Should you ever need to recreate this account, go to your .NET folder (usually \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\[versionnumber]\) and run the aspnet_regiis.exe file.
See the ATI Control Center section for more details on how to disable the many other startup items and service entries the Control Center creates which blow out the startup memory usage.
DirectX and OpenGL
There are two major graphics APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) used to develop games and 3D graphics applications on Windows platforms. These are Direct X and OpenGL (Open Graphics Library). DirectX is a Microsoft proprietary API, while OpenGL is (as the name suggests) open source software available for all to modify.
Direct3D
Direct3D (D3D) is a major component of DirectX, and the one most relevant to 3D graphics, hence people often refer to a game as being a Direct3D game. As we will see in the 3D tab under the ATI Control Panel section below, Direct3D settings only impact on Direct3D-based games, while OpenGL settings only impact on OpenGL-based games. Not a single OpenGL setting will have any effect on a Direct3D game, and vice versa.
Games also usually do not have the option of switching between OpenGL or Direct3D, and even if they do, they are usually programmed for optimal performance under one and not the other. Another thing to note is that ATI graphics cards currently perform much better under Direct3D than OpenGL, so even if you get the choice, I recommend using Direct3D wherever possible.
The important point in this discussion (without getting bogged down in technical detail) is that you need to have the latest versions of OpenGL and DirectX to ensure your graphical applications and games run optimally.
The latest version of DirectX is DirectX9.0c, and the full version can be downloaded from the Microsoft DirectX9.0c Download Site. I strongly urge you to install DirectX9.0c on your system, as it has the latest performance, stability and even security enhancements required for running 3D applications and games. As new ATI drivers are released and game updates are also released, they will take advantage of the new features in DX9.0c.
Note that DirectX cannot be successfully uninstalled, since it is a core Windows component, so experimenting with beta versions of DirectX is never recommended. Once you've installed the latest version, if you experience any DirectX-related errors, then try doing a re-install of DirectX9.0c over your existing install just to be safe. It can't do any harm and it just may resolve the problem.
OpenGL
The latest version of OpenGL is included as part of the latest version of the Catalyst drivers. This is another good reason why you should always try to run the latest version of the Catalysts, since OpenGL performance often improves with new driver releases and also a range of OpenGL-related problems or issues are resolved. You should not try to find and install any "separate" OpenGL drivers - the best ones are always included in the latest Catalyst graphics drivers.
DirectX Diagnostics
DirectX has a feature built into which provides a diagnostic function, allowing you to check the status of DirectX on your system, including the functions which have been enabled/disabled and whether all the files are correct. To use this functionality, go to Start>Run and type "DXDiag" (without quotes). This brings up the DirectX Diagnostic Tool. Make sure to skip the stage where the DXDiag asks to check all your WHQL signatures (See the Before Installing Drivers section above for the reason).
To make sure everything related to DirectX graphics on your system is fine, check in particular the information under the Display tab. Under the Display tab, in the DirectX features section you should see the words 'Enabled' next to the three functions listed. You can also run two quick tests of DirectDraw and Direct3D to make sure they are working fine. If one or more of the functions is disabled, attempt to enable it.
If you run into problems in DXDiag then this can indicate a faulty DirectX installation - in which case re-run the DirectX installation package. Also check your video-related BIOS settings and follow the recommendations in the BIOS section above. Make sure to install (or re-install) your motherboard chipset drivers, as well as a "clean install" of the latest graphics drivers (See Old Catalyst Removal section below). If overclocked, check the tips in the Overclocking section below. Finally have a quick look in the Troubleshooting section at the end of this guide. Once you've made appropriate changes, reboot and re-run DXDiag to see if any of these changes has improved the situation.
Note that if you want to save a complete listing of all your system hardware and drivers, for the purposes of providing a technical expert with relevant information to help them troubleshoot your problem, click the 'Save All Information...' button at the bottom of DXDiag. This will save a file called 'DXDiag.txt' in the directory of your choice (the desktop by default). You can then view this file with a text editor like Windows Notepad, and you can attach it to an email to someone with tech knowledge for more insight into your problems. Don't worry, it doesn't contain any private information like passwords or serial numbers.
DX9 Control Panel
There is an additional method you can use to check on important DirectX settings, although you have to be a bit more careful with this one than with DXDiag. You can use a Microsoft tool called the 'DirectX Control Panel', which can be downloaded here: DirectX Control Panel. Extract the small file called Directx.cpl and copy it into your \Windows\System32 directory. To run the program, simply go to Start>Control Panel and a new DirectX icon is now there, which you can click on to launch the DirectX Control Panel.
In the Control Panel, make sure you don't change anything to start with. The sections we will concentrate on are the Direct3D and DirectDraw tabs, as these are the ones which affect graphics performance. Under the Direct3D tab, make sure 'Allow Hardware Acceleration' is ticked, and importantly that the Debug Level slider is to the far left. Under the DirectDraw tab, again make sure 'Use Hardware Acceleration' is ticked. Under the remaining tabs just make sure that the Debug Level slider is always to the far left. If the Debug Level slider is greyed out (inaccessible), this is fine, as long as the slider is to the far left.
Don't alter any other settings unless you feel like gambling or know what you're doing. Click Apply when you're done and exit the control panel.
The next section provides information on Catalyst downloading, installation, setup and tidying up.
Catalyst Installation & Setup
The Catalysts require some attention to detail when installing and setting up, as there are several things you can do along the way to make your entire system work much better with the Catalysts. Follow the advice in this section to ensure smooth, trouble-free performance from your ATI graphics card.
Download the Latest Catalysts
The official ATI Catalyst driver package is suitable for all desktop ATI graphics cards, regardless of their brand. You may have used specific drivers found on your graphics card manufacturer's website before, or those on the CD which comes with your graphics card, however these are always based on the generic ATI Catalysts anyway and almost always well out of date. It is recommended that instead you use the latest ATI Catalysts on all graphics cards.
To download the latest Catalyst drivers, go to the ATI Driver Site, select your Operating System, select the type of ATI graphics card on your system and then simply select the model of your graphics card; if you can't see your exact graphics card model, go back and check your choices - e.g. desktop users typically need to select the 'Radeon' item, while laptop users need to select the 'Mobility Radeon' item. Once done, click the small green Go button at the bottom of the box.
On the next page you have several options available to you depending on your particular hardware and how you want to run the ATI Catalysts. The most common options are covered below:
# If you plan on using the latest Catalyst drivers along with their Catalyst Control Center (CCC), you must first make sure you've installed the Microsoft .NET Framework (see page 3 for details), then download and install the full 'Catalyst Software Suite'. Note, even if you download this package, you can still opt not to install the CCC during installation - select the 'Custom' installation option and untick the 'Catalyst Control Center' item, then continue the installation. However you will need a utility like ATI Tray Tools to alter the Catalyst settings, as you will not have a control panel to access those settings.
# If you plan on using the latest Catalyst drivers, however you know for sure you don't want to use the CCC, you can skip .NET and the full Driver+CCC package and instead download the 'Display Driver' package, and then install the latest ATI Tray Tools to alter the Catalyst settings and do a range of other things, without the excessive memory usage of the Catalyst Control Center (See Advanced Tweaking section for details).
# If you have a 9250 or older Radeon, use the 6.5 Catalysts as these cards are no longer supported in the latest Catalysts.
# If you have an 'All-in-Wonder' ATI card, or a card which has VIVO (Video In/Video Out) capabilities, you will need the full Catalyst Software Suite which includes the WDM Integrated Driver.
# If you have an X1000 series card and want to use Avivo Video conversion, also download and install the Avivio Video Converter Engine under 'Optional Downloads' - however you must install this after you've installed the latest Catalysts.
# If you have an X1000 series card and want to use Antaliasing combined with HDR in games like Oblivion, as of the 6.10 Catalysts onwards you no longer need to use 'The Chuck Patch', as this functionality is incorporated into the latest official drivers.
For earlier version of the Catalysts see the 3DChipset Archive. Alternatively, if you prefer to use 'tweaked' drivers, then I recommend the latest Omega Catalyst Drivers as being the most stable and functional to use, and which also includes a version of ATI Tray Tools in the package. I am not a big fan of other tweaked drivers; if you want the most stable performance, the latest official drivers or the Omegas are the best thing to use.
In general I always recommend using the latest available official version of the ATI Catalysts simply because they contain the largest number of specific fixes for recent games, usually have the best performance particularly in newer Pixel Shader/Vertex Shader-reliant games, and contain Dual Core and OpenGL optimizations and Control Center updates. You don't have to use the Catalyst Control Center if you don't want to, but if you are experiencing problems such as crashes and freezes I always recommend a full clean install of only the latest official drivers (see below).
Old Catalyst Removal
Now we move on to the simplest, and yet most commonly mishandled part of using graphics drivers - the removal of previous Catalyst drivers. To do this successfully, you need to follow some simple steps which will help guarantee that your installation of the drivers is 'clean', and leads to trouble-free performance. I particularly recommend this procedure if you are installing the ATI Catalyst Control Center for the first time. To completely remove your existing Catalysts, and all traces of them from your system manually do the following:
1. Uninstall any existing Catalysts. To do this, go to Control Panel>Add or Remove Programs. Select the 'ATI - Software Uninstall Utility' option if available, and click the Change/Remove button. Follow the prompts from there to uninstall your existing Catalysts, and reboot as prompted. If you have an older version of the Catalysts installed, and can't find the ATI Software Uninstall Utility item, under Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel find the 'ATI Catalyst Control Panel' and/or the 'ATI Catalyst Control Center' item(s) and uninstall them, then find the 'ATI Display Driver' item and uninstall it as well (in that order), rebooting when necessary. If you cannot find any ATI entries, you are probably using the default Windows XP drivers, which means you can skip to the Catalyst Installation section of the guide further below.
2. When you reboot, you will find Windows XP will detect your graphics card as one (or more) new devices. It will then attempt to find appropriate drivers for your card. Cancel out of all such attempts.
3. This step is optional, however it is strongly recommended if you are either (a) downgrading your Catalysts to a previous version, or (b) experiencing problems and want to ensure you have a "clean install" of the Catalysts. Basically the aim is to find all the individual ATI Catalyst driver files and remove them manually. To do this, go to your C:\Windows\System32 and C:\Windows\System32\Drivers directories, and find and delete all files beginning with 'ATI...'. You may notice that some of these files keep recreating themselves - don't worry, these are just the default XP ATI drivers which are protected and can't be permanently deleted. Just delete all the ATI driver files and let XP decide which default files the system should keep. Alternatively you can use the Windows Search function (Start>Search), with the search string ATI*.* to make searching and deletion faster. Importantly however, do not delete the files under the \ServicePackFiles or \Lastgood directories, or under any game or application-specific directories. Just stick to files found under the two directories mentioned earlier. Finally, make sure you delete the entire program folder(s) where you installed the Catalysts. The default install location is C:\ATI and/or C:\ATI Technologies but if you chose another location when installing, go there and delete the folder and all its contents. Also delete the \Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\ATI and \Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\ATI directories if you have previously installed the ATI Catalyst Control Center at any point.
If you don't have the time or patience to do things manually, or are worried about accidentally deleting the wrong file, use DriverCleaner Pro. This utility clears out remnants of old drivers from a range of manufacturers, but is no longer free. The free version of it is no longer being updated, so I recommend learning to use the manual method above.
4. This step is optional, but again it is recommended if you want to ensure a "clean install". It involves removing any ATI registry entries left over. To do this, I recommend using either RegSupreme, or its earlier (and completely free) cousin, RegCleaner 4.3. To use RegSupreme, start the program and once it has cached your files, start a 'Deep' scan, then wait and choose the 'All' item under the Select menu to highlight all the 'invalid entries' found, and click the Fix button to remove them all, making sure to save a backup under a descriptive name. To use RegCleaner, open the program and on the front page put a tick next to all the 'ATI'-related entries, and then click the 'Remove Selected' button. If you want to use the Windows XP Registry Editor instead, go to Start>Run and type "RegEdit" (without quotes). Then go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key, select the 'Software' subkey, and scroll down to the 'ATI', 'ATI Technologies' and 'ATI Technologies Inc.' entries. Right-Click on each of these keys and select Delete to remove them. Note that this method is not as thorough as using RegSupreme or RegCleaner, which find other hidden ATI entries.
That should remove all the bits and pieces of old Catalyst drivers and Control Panels which have been installed on your system previously. Of course the quickest method is to just run the ATI Software Uninstall Utility, but as I said, if you're installing the ATI Catalyst Control Centre for the first time, if you have a history of graphical problems, if you've installed multiple versions of the Catalysts without a cleanout, or you are reverting to an older version of the Catalysts from a newer one, I strongly suggest you follow all four steps above at least once.
Catalyst Installation
Once you've uninstalled the old Catalysts, there is nothing tricky or difficult about installing the new Catalysts. The whole process is simple, but here it is in case you want to be 100% certain it's being done right:
1. If you downloaded the single large Catalyst driver package (as recommended), just double-click on it to launch the driver installation wizard. If you have only the Display Drivers file, launch it instead. In both cases the installation procedure is automatic and you are given clear prompts as to what to do.
2. When installing the full Catalyst driver package (which includes the Catalyst Control Center), if you don't want to install the Catalyst Control Center then choose the 'Custom' installation method, and when prompted untick the 'Catalyst Control Center' item, and it won't be installed.
3. When the driver package prompts you for a directory to install the Catalysts, it is important to note that this directory is the place where the package files will be temporarily unzipped for installation purposes. It is not where the final drivers will be installed. You can leave the default location shown, but I personally recommend you specify an empty folder of your own choosing. In any case make a note of the directory name (See the Tidying Up section below).
4. Follow the remaining prompts and reboot as often as you are prompted, since this is also an important step in making sure Windows has a chance to replace system files which are currently in use.
Note that you may receive an error during installation indicating that the installation folder name is too long. If this occurs, simply rename the new folder created during the Catalyst install process from its long name (e.g. wxp-w2k-catalyst-ccc-8-121-050322a-022141c-english) to a shorter name (e.g. wxp), then under that folder run the Setup.exe file to continue the install process.
Tidying Up
Before we move on to tweaking the Catalysts, let's do some cleaning up and optimization of the system in preparation for more specific tweaking. These steps are important so try to do each and every one of them each time you install a new version of the Catalysts.
Delete Catalyst Installation Files
When the new Catalysts have installed, and you've rebooted your system, it is now perfectly safe for you to delete the temporary installation files which were created in the directory you specified during installation. These are simply the unzipped contents of the Catalyst installation package which were used to install the drivers elsewhere on your system - they are not the actual driver files being used by Windows. Delete them all.
Remember to also delete or backup the latest Catalyst packages which you downloaded earlier. You probably won't need to use them again given ATI are releasing new Catalysts approximately once a month now, but if you know you may need to do a reformat/reinstall of Windows soon, it may be worth saving them somewhere for future use. Try not to keep lots of older Catalysts however, as these are readily available for download around the net (See further above).
Disable ATI Services & Startup Items
When the Catalysts install on your system, they install and enable two new Services: 'ATI Hotkey Poller', 'ATI Smart' and '. You can disable one or both of these services by going to Start>Run and typing "Services.msc" (without quotes). This opens the Windows XP Services utility. Read the description for each service below and decide which should be disabled based on your circumstances:
The ATI Hotkey Poller service is primarily needed if you use the ATI Hotkey settings available in the ATI Catalyst Control Center. However, before disabling this service note the following: If you use a third party overclocking utility, you must disable this service otherwise the utility may not work; if you have an 'XT' type ATI graphics card, or a recent X1000 series card, then disabling this service can also disable the OverDrive section in the Control Center, and can also prevent correct clock speeds being applied in 3D mode, so keep it enabled; if you run a laptop with an ATI graphics card, you may need to keep this service enabled (Automatic) to allow your LCD screen to switch off properly when the laptop is closed; if you use Fast User Switching then disabling this service may also cause problems with that. Therefore on balance I recommend that if you run a recent ATI card, and if you don't use a third party overclocking utility that you should leave this service on Automatic. If you do want to run a third party overclocking utility, see the Overclocking section for more details.
The ATI Smart service is a bit more vague, as it is not needed for the ATI SmartGart settings to work. It seems to continually detect system conditions at boot time and adjust SmartGart settings if needed to maintain stability, but in effect it's just a useless resource hog. I highly recommend disabling this service - I have experienced no negative impacts by doing so. You should still be able to adjust SmartGart settings without any problems (as detailed in the Advanced SmartGart and ATI Control Center section below), however if you find your SmartGart changes won't "stick", set this service to Automatic, change your SmartGart settings, reboot and then disable this service. With the latest drivers I find this service re-enables itself automatically, even if disabled. If this is the case, leave it enabled as it is obviously needed by something.
Note that any disabled service(s) will be removed from memory after the next reboot. If you feel you are experiencing strange behavior due to the disabling of these services, you can always come back to the Services utility and re-enable them, and they will start working again after the next reboot. Disabling them does not "uninstall" them, it just prevents them from running at Windows startup and loading into memory.
You can also disable the ATI Display Adapter Assistant startup item, called ati2mdxx.exe, as it provides the system tray tool for accessing ATI settings and Hydravision. If you don't use this functionality then you can safely remove this item. To identify and remove items from your Windows startup correctly you should refer to the Startup Programs chapter of my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion for full details.
Remove Unused Devices
This is a bit more of a risky procedure, but it shouldn't be too difficult or dangerous if you follow the instructions here. If you have had several Catalysts installed on your system in the past, or even an Nvidia card installed previously on the same Windows install, not to mention any other previous items of hardware which you no longer use, then this tip lets you remove them from the registry.
To view unused devices in Device Manager, do the following:
1. Open a Command Prompt by going to Start>Run and typing "cmd" (without quotes). Once the MS DOS prompt is open, type the following lines, pressing return after each:
Set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
Devmgmt.msc
Note, you can type "exit" (without quotes) in the MS DOS prompt window to close it at any time after this.
2. In the Device Manager window that opens, go to the View menu and select 'Show Hidden Devices' - this is very important if you want to see the unused devices. Now expand each of your devices and look through all the sub-components listed. You will see that some of the devices are shown in a lighter grey color.
3. For the purposes of this guide, what we need to look for are entries under the Monitor and Display Adapter devices. Under Monitor there should be one darker monitor entry for each monitor on your system. If there are any greyed out entries, you can remove them by right-clicking on the entry and selecting 'Uninstall'. Do this for all greyed out entries under the Monitor device.
4. Under the Display Adapter device, it is normal for most Radeons to have two entries - a main one, and another one which has '- Secondary' next to it. These just indicate that your graphics card is capable of two separate outputs to two different display devices. You should keep both of these. Do not attempt to uninstall the dark Secondary entry. You can however uninstall all other greyed out entries under the Display Adapter device list.
5. If you're feeling game, you can go through some of your other device entries and delete greyed out devices which you know for certain are no longer connected to your machine, or are traces of a device which has been moved around a few times. For example, under Human Interface Devices you may find multiple greyed out entries for a mouse which you may have moved from one port to another. As long as there is a solid entry for the device when it is still connected to your system, you can uninstall the greyed out ones.
6. A final word of warning - I do not recommend uninstalling devices which you are not sure about. Most importantly, do not uninstall any greyed out Microsoft (or other Codec) entries under the Sound, Video and Game Controller device, and be extremely careful about entries under the Non Plug and Play Drivers, and Network Adapters device list. If in doubt, do not uninstall a device.
If you do happen to uninstall a device which is still connected to your system, it's not the end of the world. Windows XP will usually re-detect it upon reboot and look for drivers to reinstall it. However I urge you to take caution with the above procedures and only do Steps 1 - 4 above if you have any doubts.
Refresh Rate Fix
Windows XP and Windows 2000 have an issue in which the screen Refresh Rate – the number of times per second your monitor redraws the image on the screen - resets to 60Hz (60 times per second) for every resolution by default whenever you install a new graphics driver. This is far too low for CRT monitors, as most of them can easily exceed this refresh rate, especially at lower resolutions. Most people notice a flickering effect with a 60Hz refresh rate, and it is indeed very unhealthy for your eyes (which can detect differences up to 200Hz or more) to view for long periods. Note that this does not apply to LCD monitors which use a different refresh method, and so are fine at 60Hz.
Each time you install a new Catalyst driver, you will have to override this tendency for Windows to default to 60Hz. There are two simple ways you can do this, and the choice is up to you as to which you use:
1. In the legacy ATI Control Panel (See ATI Control Panel section below), under the Displays tab, click the name of the Monitor or Output device(s) you are using. In the Properties box which opens, under the Attributes tab you will find a setting called 'Refresh Rate Override'. Make sure the 'Use DDC Information' option is ticked, then open the list and set this to a value above 60Hz supported by your monitor, and it should improve your refresh rate and ease eye strain.
If you are using the ATI Catalyst Control Center instead, select the 'Displays Manager' item, and then at the bottom of the page you can select a refresh rate higher than 60Hz (if supported) for particular resolutions. Make sure you don't select a refresh rate beyond your monitor's capabilities as this will result in an 'out of frequency' error and can damage your monitor.
2. Alternatively (and this is the method I use) you can use a Refresh Rate fix, such as Refresh Force. Download this small utility and run it (launch ReForce.exe). This is the foolproof method. Just click the 'Auto Populate' button and it will detect the correct maximum possible refresh rates for each supported resolution on your monitor. You can also view and manually change the refresh rate for any resolution (be careful to make sure your monitor supports the new refresh rate entered though!), and even specify additional display resolutions. Click the Apply button and the fix is done. It won't run again at startup, or sit in the background, it just changes some registry settings. You will need to use this utility again every time you install a new driver, so keep it handy.
Defragment
This is a simple but important step which should never be skipped. You should defragment your hard drive after installing/copying/deleting/patching any application, game, driver or large file. Any time files are added to or deleted from your hard drive it can become "fragmented" meaning portions of the one program may be spread over several physical areas of your hard drive. This fragmentation increases loading times and often results in greater "stuttering", especially during games.
To run the Disk Defragment Utility, go to Start>Run and type "Dfrg.msc" (without quotes). When the utility opens, forget about running the Analyzer, just click the Defragment button and make sure you don't do anything else on your computer while it is busy. The process of defragmenting your drive may take quite a while if you've added/removed very large files, or if you haven't defragmented in a long time, so be patient. It will become much faster if you defragment more often - get into the habit of doing it at least once a week for optimal performance. For more details of advanced defragmentation, see the Drive Optimization section of my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion.
Advanced SmartGart (Control Panel users & AGP Graphics Cards)
For legacy ATI Control Panel users you can check upon - and if necessary change - some of the "Advanced" SmartGart settings for your ATI graphics card by following the steps in this section. Note if you use the ATI Control Center instead, you can access these settings under the SmartGart section of the Control Center. The advice below also applies to the ATI Control Center settings of the same name. PCI-E users don't need to worry about SmartGart settings as they don't apply to such cards, only AGP cards.
To access these advanced settings, go to Start>Run and type "SmartGart" (without quotes). This will bring up the Advanced SmartGart properties box. There are two sets of settings here, PCI Settings and AGP Settings. If you have an AGP graphics card (which almost all recent graphics cards are), then you can ignore the PCI section, and vice versa.
The main purpose of going into the Advanced SmartGart properties is not so much to change anything, but to make sure that under the relevant section the Write and Read settings are set to 'On'. For example, if you have an AGP graphics card, the AGP Write and AGP Read settings should both say On in the 'Current' box next to them. This provides optimal performance, and there should be no reason either or both of them should ever be set to Off.
If you find that one or both are set to Off, set them both to On and click Apply at the bottom of the box. Reboot your system, and go back into Advanced SmartGart and check to see if they are now On. If they are then everything is fine.
However, if they won't remain On, then typically you will need to install/re-install the latest Motherboard AGP drivers, and also check and change your BIOS settings as covered in the relevant sections of this guide above. You can also try re-enabling the 'ATI Smart' service if you disabled it previously.
The next section begins looking at all the settings in the ATI Control Panel.
The ATI Control Panel
Once you've installed the Catalysts and performed a bit of initial optimization and tidying up, you come to the point at which you need to make some major and minor adjustments to your graphics card's operation using the ATI Control Panel. Note that if you have installed the new ATI Catalyst Control Center then you should go to the ATI Control Center section on Page 7 instead of this section.
Note: This Control Panel section will no longer be updated, as ATI have dropped support for the Control Panel in the latest Catalysts. For maximum stability and functionality I strongly recommend against mixing newer ATI drivers with older versions of the Control Panel. See the ATI Control Center section of this guide for more details. If you don't like using the new CCC, instead install only the ATI graphics drivers and then use ATI Tray Tools to control graphics functionality - see the Advanced Tweaking section.
To access the ATI Control Panel, go to Start>Control Panel and double-click on Display to open the Display Properties box. A quicker way to access these settings is to right-click on an empty area of your desktop and choose Properties.
Click to enlarge
The options under the Settings tab are covered below:
Settings
Display: In this drop down box you will usually find at least two items, the first being your current monitor, and the second being a 'Secondary' device, which can be chosen if you have two output devices connected to your system, such as two monitors or a monitor and a TV. To see which device you are currently outputting to, click the 'Identify' button at the bottom of the box, and a large number '1' will appear on your primary display, and if connected, a '2' will appear on your secondary display. If you do not see two output devices then your graphics card does not support dual displays.
Screen resolution: This setting determines your Windows Desktop resolution, and can be chosen to taste. It won't determine the resolution for games - you set those within each game. Choose a resolution which is comfortable to view. Higher resolutions require greater graphics power to render, though this doesn't have any real impact on performance in games or on your desktop.
Color quality: This setting determines how many possible colors can be used on your Windows Desktop. The higher the bits (i.e. 16 bit, 32 bit) the greater the number of possible colors and hence the richer the graphics will appear. You can set this to taste, however it is important to note that when playing games, it is often recommended that you match your desktop color quality with that chosen in the game to prevent any graphical anomalies or problems. Higher color quality requires greater graphics power to render in 3D games, but makes little difference to your desktop (2D) performance.
Click the Advanced button to access the main ATI Control Panel. Each section of the ATI Control Panel is covered in detail below:
General
DPI Setting: DPI is Dots Per Inch, and you can select a higher or lower DPI by choosing 'custom setting...'. The higher the DPI from the default (96), the larger everything will appear on your screen. Conversely the lower the DPI, the smaller everything will appear.
Compatibility: Whenever you change your screen resolution under the Settings tab, this option will determine whether you need to 'Restart the computer before applying the new display settings', or if the computer will 'Apply the new display settings without restarting' or whether it will 'Ask me before applying the new display settings'. I personally recommend the second option, 'Apply the new display settings without restarting' as it provides the fastest method, and should cause no problems with recent applications or games. If you get a blank screen or display corruption with this setting when changing resolutions, you have an older monitor which requires you choose one of the other options.
Adapter
This tab lists information about your graphics card (also known as a 'graphics adapter'). If the information is incorrect, you may need to reinstall your drivers using the "clean install" method (See Old Catalyst Removal section above), and also ensure you have the latest motherboard drivers installed (See Motherboard AGP Drivers section above). If you want to check this information against another source, you can install SiSoft Sandra and run the 'Video System Information' module, or check the System Information in 3DMark 2003 (See Benchmarking & Stress Testing section below).
Properties: Clicking the Properties button will show you the current graphics device and driver version you are using.
List All Modes: This button provides a list of all the resolutions and refresh rates your current graphics card and monitor combination supports. It is important to remember what the highest resolution and refresh rates are for your system, since if at any time you set a resolution and/or refresh rate higher than is supported, you will get an 'out of frequency' error on your monitor, and it will not display any image. This can sometimes cause damage to your monitor, so be careful not to exceed your system's capabilities in this regard. Usually your system will prevent you from being able to use higher resolutions/refresh rates than are supported.
Monitor
This section lists information about your current output device. Clicking the Properties button shows the device along with its current drivers. You should try to update these drivers by doing a search on Google for your monitor manufacturer's website, or for your particular monitor's brand and model number. Having the latest monitor drivers means optimal image reproduction, so it's worth making sure you have the latest drivers.
Screen Refresh Rate: This box shows the current refresh rate used to display your Windows Desktop. The refresh rate is the number of times per second your graphics card and monitor redraw the image on your screen. This is typically expressed in terms of Hz, which is a measure of frequency. For example, 100Hz = 100 times per second. The higher the frequency, the more comfortable the image is for your eyes to view. The lower the frequency, the more flickering you may notice, and long term exposure to low frequency displays can harm your eyes.
To adjust this value, first tick the 'Hide modes that this monitor cannot display' box, for the reasons explained under the Adapter section above. Then select the highest available frequency in the drop down box and click Apply to see the difference. Also refer to the Tidying Up section for more information about Refresh Rate fixes/overrides if the highest value here is 60Hz.
Troubleshoot
Hardware Acceleration: This setting determines the level of advanced functionality support supplied by your graphics hardware. There are certain graphical functions which are sped up when run through your graphics card, and this slider determines just how many of those are actually accelerated by doing so. This slider should always be set to the far right (Full Acceleration) for maximum performance.
However, there may be instances where you are experiencing a great many graphics-related problems and for the purposes of troubleshooting, you may lower the slider one or more notches to the left. If doing so reduces the frequency of crashes and problems, then you will need to run through the various procedures in this guide for ensuring everything from your drivers to your hardware is optimally set up. If everything else fails, you may need to keep this slider one or more notches to the left of Full, however this is typically not recommended as it reduces your performance.
Enable Write Combining: Write Combining is a technique which merges multiple operations into a single read or write, increasing graphics performance. However just like Fast Writes (See BIOS section above), having it enabled may cause problems and exacerbate instabilities on various system configurations. For most people, I recommend ticking 'Enable Write Combining' as it increases performance and should not cause any problems. However if you continually experience crashes, particularly the 'infinite loop' error, you can try unticking this setting to see if things improve.
Color Management
This section lists the 'color profiles' your monitor uses to determine how to display colors correctly. Correct color display in this sense means showing colors on the screen precisely as they were intended to be displayed by the developers of the software.
The correct color profile for your monitor is typically placed as an .ICM file in the \WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\color\ directory when you install your monitor drivers. Your monitor drivers are usually contained on the driver CD which came with your monitor. If you haven't installed these already, I strongly recommend you do so now, and if necessary, manually search for the correct .ICM file and place it in the directory mentioned above. If you do not have a driver disk, or cannot find it, then you should search the internet for your monitor manufacturer's website, and/or your monitor's brand and model number, and find the latest drivers.
When you have placed the .ICM file in the directory above, click the Add button here, highlight the file and click Add again to add it to the list. Then select the relevant item in the list and click 'Set As Default', then click the Apply button to use it.
Displays
This screen lists the possible output devices you can have connected to your system, and the names of those which are currently active are bold, while those not connected are greyed out. By default, most people will have a single display - the Monitor - connected up to their computer. However if you have multiple displays, you can set them up in various ways and then save these configurations under particular Schemes, which you can then switch between as necessary.
To change the properties of a particular display, click its name just above its picture. In the properties box which opens, there are three tabs, each covered below. Note that the information below is for a normal computer monitor:
Attributes
This box shows the DDC (Display Data Channel) information for your monitor. DDC is a method by which your monitor communicates its properties to your graphics card, so that they both work within the physical limits of the monitor. This prevents damage from things like 'out of frequency' errors, whereby the graphics card attempts to use a higher resolution and/or refresh rate than the monitor can handle.
If you don't see any DDC Information displayed, make sure the 'Use DDC Information' button is ticked under the Monitor Attributes section below. If this option is unavailable, or cannot be ticked, then your monitor is fairly old and does not support DDC. In that case, be extremely careful since monitors which do not support DDC can be damaged by the user selecting too high a frequency/resolution. Read your monitor's manual (or search for it online), and manually set the 'Maximum Resolution' and 'Maximum Refresh' options to the correct values to prevent damage to your monitor.
Refresh Rate Override: This setting is covered under the Tidying Up section above. You should only enable this setting if your monitor supports DDC, and you are not using a refresh rate fix already.
Adjustments
Screen Position, Screen Size: Using the arrows and the '+' and '-' buttons, you can resize and move the image on your screen around until it fits the screen better. If you run into any problems, click the Defaults button to return to the normal screen size and position and start again.
I recommend resizing and repositioning the image on your screen to ensure that the image evenly touches the four edges of your monitor screen. However ideally you should use the controls on your monitor to resize, reshape and reposition the image to perfectly match the monitor screen. You may have to do this several times, at various resolutions and refresh rates. If then you reach some sort of limitation with the monitor controls, you can use these software controls for further adjustments.
Advanced
The Horizontal and Vertical synchronization of your monitor are controlled by the settings here. You will typically see a '+' or a '-' sign against the Horizontal and Vertical settings. I strongly advise you not to alter these unless you are directed to by a technical support person, or you know precisely what you are doing. Clicking on the buttons can result in loss of video signal (black screen) and even potential damage to your monitor.
In particular, the Composite option combines the vertical and horizontal synchronization signals into one, and is only for composite monitors. Do not click on the blue Composite button unless you are certain you are using a composite monitor.
Troubleshoot
This section provides you with the option of forcing 720p mode (720 lines Progressive Scan) or 1080i mode (1080 lines Interlaced). These options are typically used when you are outputting to a device such as an HDTV which is capable of display 720 horizontal lines or more.
Be very careful with these settings as forcing a resolution mode here which is not supported by your display device can cause damage to the device and usually results in an 'out of frequeny' or 'no signal' error.
Once you're done with all the settings in the Displays section, click the Apply button.
Color
If you believe you don't have appropriate color and brightness on your monitor when displaying the Windows desktop, or in particular games, you should firstly make sure you have the correct Color Profile for your monitor installed (See Color Management above). If this does not resolve any problems, you can manually change the color and brightness/contrast/gamma settings for your Desktop and/or 3D games in this section.
The first choice you have to make is whether you want to adjust these settings for your Windows Desktop (Select the 'Desktop' option), or for 3D Applications (Select the 'Full Screen 3D' option).
Next, you can select whether you want to change the Gamma, Brightness and Contrast properties of the Red, Green and Blue colors individually (Untick 'All Colors' and select the Red, Green, or Blue options) or for all of them at once (Tick 'All Colors').
For each color, or for all colors, you can then move the Gamma, Brightness and Contrast sliders to the left or right to adjust the properties as appropriate. If you want to reset your choice for a particular slider, click the Reset button next to it. If you want to reset all your changes back to the 'normal' values, click the Default button.
Once you've adjusted the sliders to display colors the way you want them. click in the Profiles box and enter a name for this particular color setup, and then click the Save button. To apply a particular profile, bring up its name and click the Apply button. Just remember that Desktop profiles only apply to the Windows Desktop, while Full Screen 3D profiles only come into effect when running 3D Games.
Once again, for most people I recommend using the default values here and adjusting your monitor's controls to achieve optimal color and brightness/contrast. Alternatively you can use the Colorfill option to improve the vibrancy of colors (See Rage3D Tweak section below).
The next section continues the descriptions and recommendations for the remaining components in the ATI Control Panel.
The ATI Control Panel (Pt.2)
Options
This section displays information about the Catalyst version, your graphics card, and controls various options which determine how the Catalysts run.
Catalyst Version: This information at the top of the box shows the Catalyst version as it is commonly referred to (e.g. Catalyst 4.12). Check the ATI Driver Website regularly for newer versions, typically released at the start of each month.
2D Version, Packaging Version: This information provides the internal codes used by ATI to distinguish the driver versions they release. You should really only focus on the Catalyst Version provided above.
Details: To get further information about your graphics card, click the Details button.
Re-activate all warning messages: Periodically when changing settings in the ATI Control Panel, you will get warning messages which you can choose to permanently dismiss. Selecting this option re-enables all the warning messages you dismissed earlier. I recommend leaving this option unticked.
Enable ATI taskbar icon application: Ticking this option enables the ATI Taskbar Application utility which typically displays as a small ATI icon in your system tray (bottom right of the Windows desktop). You can access the utility by right-clicking on that small ATI icon. To be honest I believe this utility to be thoroughly useless, unless you are constantly changing your basic display settings and want quick access to them. I recommend unticking this option to disable the ATI Taskbar Application from your desktop, as it uses up system memory. You can still change all your ATI settings using the ATI Control Panel as normal.
Show ATI icon on taskbar: As the name implies, this shows the small ATI icon in your system tray, to indicate that the ATI Taskbar Utility is active. If you have disabled the ATI Taskbar Application, this option will be greyed out. Unticking this option will not remove the ATI Taskbar Application, it will only remove the icon. The Taskbar Application will still be active (and use system memory), so once again I recommend disabling the ATI Taskbar Application (see above) and ignore this setting.
Disable quick resolution feature: If you have the ATI Taskbar Application enabled, the 'quick resolution feature' provides a menu (when you left-click on the small ATI icon in your system tray) which provides options for changing the color quality (16 and 32 Bits Per Pixel) and your desktop resolution. Once again, this is a relatively useless function, since not many people constantly change their desktop resolution and color quality. Tick this box to disable this feature and free up some system resources, and should you need to, change your color quality and resolution in the ATI Control Panel as usual.
Reduce DVI frequency on high-resolution displays: This option changes the frequency on displays which have a DVI (Digital Visual Interface) input, typically LCD or TFT flat panel monitors. If you are experiencing graphical anomalies or problems on such displays when running at high resolutions (i.e. 1024x768 or above), tick this option. For everyone who is using a standard computer CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitor make sure this option is unticked.
Alternative DVI operational mode: If you use a DVI display (as described above), and experience graphical anomalies or problems (at any resolution), tick this option. For everyone else, make sure this option is unticked.
Once you've made the relevant changes here, click the Apply button at the bottom of the box.
Click to enlarge
Rotation
The options under this section of the ATI Control Panel determine the angle of the image on the screen. The 'Standard Landscape' view is what the vast majority of people will use, and is clearly the recommended option.
However should you for any reason wish to view the image at a different angle, or perhaps if you have a display that can be rested on any of its sides, you can use this section of the Control Panel to alter the image so it displays correctly.
Overlay
The overlay options in this section of the Control Panel determine the brightness, contrast, saturation, hue and gamma settings for any image which displays through a video overlay, such as DVD playback.
You can only change these settings when playing back a video file type which supports overlay adjustment, otherwise the sliders will be greyed out. When available, moving the sliders will adjust the properties of the image and you can immediately see the impact of these on the video output.
Theater Mode Options
These settings are available if you have an ATI graphics card which is capable of supporting a Primary and Secondary display, and a secondary display is connected. Clone Mode produces an identical image of your primary display on the secondary display.
Overlay Display Mode: The options here determine what type of video playback is displayed on your two displays. 'Standard' mode shows video playback on your Primary display only. 'Theater mode' shows video playback on both Primary and Secondary displays, with the Secondary display showing the video playback in full screen. 'Same on all' shows the same video playback on both Primary and Secondary displays.
Theater Mode Settings: If using Theater Mode, you can select the aspect ratio of the video playback here - that is whether it displays at the ratio it was designed to play ('Same as source video'), or one which fills the entire screen but may appear distorted or is clipped ('Full Screen Video').
Display Device Aspect Ratio: When video playback is displayed full screen, you can determine the aspect ratio of the playback. Aspect Ratio is the width of the image versus the height of the image. 4:3 ratio is the standard TV/computer monitor size, while 16:9 is the standard Widescreen movie format, such as that used for most DVDs and by recent HDTVs.
SmartGart
The settings here have a significant impact on your system stability, and to some degree on your performance.
Set AGP Speed: AGP Speed is detailed under the BIOS Section above. Your current AGP speed is shown here, and you can manually change it by using the slider. Note that certain AGP Speeds may be greyed out, either because they offer significantly lower performance, or because your motherboard and/or graphics card do not support those speeds. It is recommended that you set the highest available AGP Speed here for optimal performance. If at any time you begin experiencing lots of crashes, freezes and other problems, you can reduce the AGP Speed here in an attempt to increase system stability. Also make sure the AGP speed set here matches the one you set in your BIOS.
Fast Write: This setting is detailed under the BIOS section above, and is essentially the same as the BIOS setting of the same name. Your current Fast Write setting (On or Off) is shown here. As mentioned earlier, Fast Write is a major source of instability on most systems and provides little to no performance benefit, so it is strongly recommended that you select Off here to disable Fast Writes.
Retest All: If you click on this button, the SmartGart system will retest your system in an attempt to find the "best" settings. Of course, these settings will typically be exactly the same as they were when you first opened the SmartGart tab, so there should be no reason for you to use this option unless you want to return to the default settings.
Importantly, if you have changed any of these settings, clicking the Apply button will require that you reboot your system to implement the changes. Once you reboot, come back into the ATI Control Panel and check these settings under the SmartGart tab. If they haven't changed, it is highly likely you will need to first install the latest motherboard AGP driver and alter other important settings such as those in your BIOS and in the Advanced SmartGart properties (See relevant sections above).
3D
Direct3D, OpenGL: As discussed under the DirectX and OpenGL section above, these are the two major APIs used to develop modern 3D games. When the Direct3D option is selected here, you are explicitly changing settings which only affect Direct3D-based games. If you select the OpenGL option, the settings you change in this box will impact on OpenGL games only. So in effect there are two sets of settings, and the ones you change at any particular time depend on whether you've selected Direct3D or OpenGL.
The settings below appear under both Direct3D and OpenGL, and are discussed below. The performance and visual quality impacts are similar under both APIs:
Use Recommended Settings for: If you don't want to customize your graphics settings (and if 'Use Custom Settings' is unticked), you can simply use the slider here to adjust whether you want your settings to provide faster performance (slider to the left), or better image quality (slider to the right), or a balance of both (slider in the middle). I do not recommend using this slider unless you are extremely lazy, as it is far wiser to follow the instructions below to change each and every setting individually for optimal performance and image quality.
To customize your graphics settings, tick the 'Use Custom Settings' box, and then click the 'Custom' button. The custom settings are covered below, and remember once again that if you are in Direct3D mode, the custom settings you adjust will only apply to Direct3D games, and in OpenGL mode they only impact on OpenGL games.
Custom
Antialiasing, Anisotropic Filtering: For more details of about what Antialiasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) are, and what exactly they do, read the relevant portions of my Gamer's Graphics & Display Settings Guide. The guide also includes screenshots and resources for you to be able to see precisely what the impact of various levels of AA and AF are in games.
Temporal Antialiasing: A more recent setting for ATI graphics cards is Temporal Antialiasing, a setting which I don't cover in my guide above - so I'll cover it here. For a technical description of Temporal Antialiasing, try this description, but essentially it is a driver trick designed to give the effect of a higher level of Antialiasing, but with a lower performance hit. For example, if you enable Temporal Antialiasing and select 2x on the Antialiasing sample slider, during a game given the right conditions (high framerates) it will look almost exactly like 4x Antialiasing, but with the performance impact of only 2x Antialiasing. Since the image quality of Temporal Antialiasing cannot be captured properly in a screenshot, the only way to determine if you like it or not is to try it yourself.
Some important things to note here about Antialiasing and Anisotropic in general:
Forced Antialiasing/Anisotropic Filtering: If you select any level of Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering using the sliders here, it will force that level on any game you run, overriding its own settings. As an example, if you have 4x Antialiasing selected in the ATI Control Panel, and 2x Antialiasing selected in a game, this results in 4x Antialiasing overall, not 2x or 6x. Note that with certain games (like Halo), forcing Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering can cause additional slowdowns and graphical anomalies.
Application Preference: If you have 'Application Preference' ticked for Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering, the slider bar against the setting will be greyed out. This indicates that the level of Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering is determined by the settings you choose for them in each particular game.
Samples: Both Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering have '2x' as their lowest sample rate available here. Increasing the sample rate improves image quality but lowers performance the higher the sample rate. If you want to completely disable either Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering you have to tick the 'Application Preference' box, then make sure that in each particular game you run you select the lowest possible AA and/or AF setting there too. If there are no Antialiasing or Anisotropic settings in a particular game, then choosing 'Application Preference' automatically ensures the fastest performance.
Performance and Quality options: If you have unticked 'Application Preference' for Anisotropic Filtering, you will see an option to select 'Performance' or 'Quality' modes. Performance mode is equivalent to using Bilinear Filtering, while Quality mode uses Trilinear Filtering, but essentially there is no noticeable visual quality difference, and Performance mode runs slightly faster, so I recommend selecting Performance mode.
That covers the Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings.
Texture Preference: This slider determines how good textures (the surfaces of all 3D objects in games) look. Most games already have their own specific texture detail settings you can alter, but in addition to those, if you move this slider to the right, the textures may look better, but your framerates may also be lower. Texture quality has the greatest potential performance impact on graphics cards with lower Video Memory, such as 64MB or less. Note that certain games will show graphical anomalies such as missing or flashing textures if you set this slider to anything lower than the far right ('High Quality').
Mipmap Detail Level: This slider also helps determine how good textures look, when combined with your game's texture settings and the Texture Preference setting above. By moving the slider to the right, textures should appear sharper and more detailed, but performance is reduced. Once again, by lowering this slider you may see texture anomalies in particular games, so increase the slider if that is the case.
Wait for Vertical Sync: Vertical Sync (Vertical Synchronization, also called VSync) is the synchronization of your graphics card and monitor's abilities to redraw the screen a number of times each second (measured in FPS or Hz). If this slider is set to 'Application Preference', whether VSync is enabled or disabled will depend on the VSync setting in each particular game. This is the mode I strongly recommend, since you can then adjust VSync in each game separately. If you are certain you want to disable VSync for all your games, select 'Always Off' here. Generally speaking, turning off VSync gives the fastest performance however if VSync is disabled you may see some image "tearing" as your monitor and graphics card go slightly out of synchronization when the refresh rate exceeds the monitor's abilities. If you are certain you want to force VSync to be enabled in all your games, regardless of their individual settings, select 'Always On' here (not recommended). When VSync is enabled, this removes all image tearing, but can reduce performance and limits your maximum framerate to the refresh rate (e.g. at 70Hz, with VSync on your maximum FPS in a game can only be 70 frames per second). Note that under OpenGL, 'Application Preference' is actually split into 'Default On' and 'Default Off' - this means that VSync will be On or Off by default unless specified otherwise by the game.
TruForm: This is a proprietary ATI graphics method, designed to smooth out curved surfaces of 3D characters, objects and terrain. It does this by increasing the polygon count of objects, and is supported on more recent Radeon cards. TruForm only works on games which support TruForm, and if set to 'Application Preference' here and enabled in a game, it improves image quality at the cost of reduced performance. I recommend disabling TruForm by setting it to 'Always Off' here, as most games don't support TruForm, and those that do take a noticeable performance hit when using it.
Before we go any further, click the Apply button to implement the settings selected here, and note that changing Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering settings will result in a slight flickering of the screen as they are put into effect. This is normal.
SmartShader Effects: If supported by your graphics card, there are a range of graphical effects you can choose to enable in 3D applications and games, purely for novelty value. I recommend selecting 'No Effect' here for normal gameplay.
Profiles: If you find yourself changing your 3D settings often, either for OpenGL or Direct3D, you can save various combinations of them as different profiles by entering a name in the box and clicking Save. Then whenever you want to switch between settings quickly, you can select the appropriate profile, click Apply and it will be applied straight away. At the moment the ATI Control Panel does not have the ability to create per-game profiles which can automatically detect the game you are running and implement the settings you wish to use for that game.
Compatibility
When Direct3D is selected at the top of the box, clicking the Compatibility button at the bottom provides access to two important settings:
Support DXT texture formats: DXT is DirectX Texture Compression, which compresses textures into smaller sizes, making them easier to load into Video Memory and hence speeding up graphics performance with minimal loss in the quality of textures. It is strongly recommended that you make sure this option is Enabled to support DXT texture formats for maximum performance.
Alternate Pixel Center: This setting changes where the center of each pixel originates, and that can resolve problems such as texture or text anomalies in games. You should leave this Disabled unless you experience precisely those sort of problems.
When OpenGL is selected at the top of the box and the Compatibility button is clicked, the following important settings can be accessed:
Force Z-Buffer depth: The Z-Buffer controls the rendering of depth in 3D games, such as which objects are hidden behind others when viewed at a distance. A 32-bit Z-Buffer provides greater precision than a 24-bit Z-Buffer and so forth. Greater precision means less chance of errors, which often appear in the form of objects showing through each other, or having missing or flashing bits. This option allows you to force a specific level of Z-Buffer precision, however Disabled is the setting recommended for everyone, since the Z-Buffer precision should normally be left to be determined by each game. If you do see a lot of errors and glitches in distant objects in games, you can try forcing a higher Z-Buffer depth, but this typically reduces performance.
Triple Buffering: Set this option to Enabled to improve overall performance when VSync is enabled. Using Triple Buffering may cause problems for graphics cards with lower Video RAM, so disable this option if you’re experiencing problems such as mouse lag.
Click Apply to implement all the settings selected here.
VPU Recover
Enable VPU Recover: VPU Recover attempts to stop any sort of graphics-related crashes or freezes from completely locking up or resetting your machine. While this is a valiant idea, in practice VPU Recover has been known to increase the probability of problems and crashes itself when enabled, and more importantly using VPU Recover regularly is a sign that something is wrong with your system and you need to find the source of the problem. I recommend that you untick (disable) VPU Recover to increase system stability, and then seek out and remedy the source of any problems by using the tips in the rest of this guide, such as those in the Troubleshooting section below.
Prepare an Error Report: If VPU Recover is enabled, this option will be available to be ticked. If ticked, it means that every time your system has an error which VPU Recover helps recover from, an email will be generated which you can send to ATI disclosing the details of the problem. While this may help ATI in determining the cause of certain issues, more often than not it is completely unnecessary and I recommend unticking this option, even if you do use VPU Recover.
Click Apply to put these changes into effect.
OverDrive
If you have a Radeon XT graphics card, then you will find an OverDrive tab available in your ATI Control Panel. The most useful feature of this tab is the 'Current Temperature' display, which is only possible due to the presence of a temperature sensor on XT-based graphics cards. This is the reason why non-XT cards do not have Overdrive, because it requires the physical presence of this temperature diode onboard the card itself.
If you tick 'Enable Overdrive', the OverDrive software will actively monitor your graphics card's temperature and allow you to manually overclock your video card's GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) core/engine speed as well as the memory if it is safe to do so. This is a nice method of achieving some extra performance safely, since OverDrive will not allow your graphics card to fry by overclocking it to insane speeds. If you want to overclock your system see the Overclocking section for more details.
A common question asked by XT users (and indeed other graphics card users) is "What is a safe temperature for my graphics card?" Well under most circumstances the 50-60 degree (Celcius) range is considered quite normal at idle, increasing into the high 70s under load. These temperatures will rise when overclocking. See the Overclocking section for more information on cooling.
Remember to make sure the ATI Hotkey Poller service is set to Automatic (See Tidying Up section above), otherwise the OverDrive tab may not be available in the ATI Control Panel.
We have now come to the end of the ATI Control Panel descriptions. The next section covers the ATI Control Center and its functionality. If you are using the ATI Control Panel, you can skip ahead to the Advanced Tweaking section to further optimize your graphics performance.
The ATI Catalyst Control Center
The ATI Catalyst Control Center (CCC for short) is the new user interface for the ATI Catalyst Drivers, and is the replacement for the legacy ATI Control Panel covered in the previous 2 pages. The ATI Control Center works on all Radeon graphics cards and is constantly being refined by ATI to include new features.
So what exactly are the differences between the old Control Panel and the Control Center? The major differences are that that Control Center has a customizeable Graphical User Interface (GUI) and it has some new features - such as Catalyst AI and Geometry Instancing (See below) - which the Control Panel does not have. The majority of OpenGL and Direct3D options have now been merged into a single '3D' section - the choices you make for Anisotropic Filtering for example will apply to both Direct3D and OpenGL. The most prominent feature is that you can now see a real-time 3D preview of the impact of 3D-related graphics options. This means you can change the Mipmap Detail Level for example, and see precisely how that impacts on 3D images.
As of Catalyst 5.12 onwards, ATI have dropped official support for the legacy ATI Control Panel, so I strongly suggest you either install the latest Catalyst Control Center for maximum stability and functionality, or see the Advanced Tweaking section for an alternative. However, once you install the Control Center there are several things you must do to make sure it runs smoothly. These are covered up front here:
Microsoft .NET Framework
The first thing which is vital to do is to install the Microsoft .NET Framework. The ATI Catalyst Control Center will not function without .NET installed on your system. To find out more about how to do this correctly, and what exactly the .NET Framework does, refer to page 3 of this guide. Once you've installed the .NET Framework 2.0, you can install the ATI Catalyst Control Center, as covered on Page 4 of this guide. The procedure is not significantly different to the way you would have installed Catalysts in the past.
Stripping Away Control Center Resource Usage
One of the very first things you will notice if you choose to use the ATI Catalyst Control Center is that upon rebooting your system after its installation, your Windows startup time may be noticeably longer. If you do a quick check of your memory usage you will find it has blown out by anything from 40MB to 160MB or more as a result of the .NET Framework and the new Control Center. You can check your memory usage by using Task Manager (press CTRL + ALT + DEL at the same time) and observe the 'Commit Charge' figure at the bottom right hand corner of the Task Manager. The figure on the left of the backslash is your current usage, the figure on the right is your total available system memory (RAM + Virtual Memory)
I personally find this an unacceptable amount of resource overhead from any application, even one as necessary as a graphics driver control panel. Even though newer versions of the Control Center use less resources, the additional memory usage by .NET and the Control Center can result in increased stuttering in games and other applications, particularly on systems with less than 1GB of RAM. However fortunately you can remove all the unnecessary Control Center-related items from your startup and still have everything function properly when needed. Follow the procedures below:
1. Remove the ATI Catalyst Control Center System Tray - if you don't use the ATI CCC Tray item (bottom right corner of your screen), then you can disable it from loading up each time you restart Windows by opening the ATI Catalyst Control Center - either by right-clicking on the Windows Desktop and selecting it from the context menu, or from the Windows Control Panel>Display Properties>Settings>Advanced>Catalyst Control Center. In the Control Center, click on the small drop-down arrow next to the Preferences button, and untick the 'Enable System Tray Menu' item. You should also go to Start>All Programs>Startup and delete the relevant ATI entry (right-click on it and select Delete). Obviously if you want to use this system tray tool, you can skip this step. I personally recommend using ATI Tray Tools instead as your main ATI system tray-based utility (See Advanced Tweaking section).
2. Remove Additional ATI Services - Go to Start>Run and type "Services.msc" (without quotes). This will open up the Services properties box. Make sure the ATI Smart and ATI Hotkey Poller services are configured as per the instructions on Page 4 of this guide, under the Tidying Up section. Also make sure you configure the 'Windows User Mode Driver Framework' service as per the instructions under the Microsoft .NET Framework section on Page 3 of this guide. For most people this involves setting all three of these services to Disabled, however read the relevant sections for more details as you may need to leave the ATI Hotkey Poller enabled.
3. Remove Unnecessary ATI Startup Items - Go to Start>Run and type "Regedit" (without quotes). Expand the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key, then SOFTWARE>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion and finally click on the Run key. Under this key you will see several entries in the right hand side. For more details of how to identify unnecessary startup items, and other methods of removing them (if you're not comfortable with using the Regsitry Editor), see the Startup Programs chapter of my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion. However for the moment I will specifically mention the ATI Control Center-related entries you can remove. For starters, you can remove the ATIPTA (atiptaxx.exe) item if it exists from older installations of the Control Center. You can also remove the main ATICCC (Cli.exe) item, which is the primary memory hog. The CLI.exe item is not required for your graphics drivers to function properly, however it is required for the CCC to open. Fortunately though, with the latest version of the Catalyst Control Center, even if you remove this startup item and/or close the CLI.exe process in Task Manager, whenever the CCC is launched it will automatically restart this process as required. So you don't need to have it loaded up at Windows startup.
By disabling all the unnecessary .NET Framework Accounts/Services, all the useless ATI Services and startup items I was able to return my system's memory usage back to what it was before I had installed the Control Center, and more importantly my gaming performance returned to normal, without the stuttering which had begun after I had installed the ATI Catalyst Control Center. It really is ridiculous that a driver package takes up over 100MB of extra RAM just to provide a little bit of additional functionality, and I'm truly hoping ATI continues to refine the package to become a bit more streamlined.
Note, if you want to remove the 'ATI Catalyst Control Center' entry which appears in your context menus (e.g. when you right-click on the Windows Desktop), follow the procedure below. Note that I find this is a handy way to access the CCC, so it's not vital that you remove it. However if you still want to remove it:
1. Start the Windows Registry Editor by going to Start>Run and typing "Regedit" (without quotes).
2. In the Registry Editor, go to the following key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
3. Delete the 'ACE' entry (and any other ATI-related entries) by right-clicking on its folder and selecting Delete to remove the entire folder and its contents.
You can now check the effects of this immediately by going back to your desktop and right-clicking to check the context menu. The ATI Catalyst Control Center entry will be gone, but note that this cannot be "undone", so either backup using System Restore if you're not sure about this modification, or simply reinstall the ATI Catalysts and the entry will be recreated.
Click to enlarge
ATI Catalyst Control Center
There are several ways to access the ATI Control Center. You can go to Start>Control Panel and double-click on Display to open the Display Properties box, then click Settings>Advanced>Catalyst Control Center and click the ATI Catalyst Control Center button to launch it. Alternatively, you can right-click on an empty area of the Windows Desktop and select it from the top of the context menu, or use the shortcut placed in your Start>All Programs>ATI Catalyst Control Center menu (or on your Desktop).
Once again, if you have any problems or errors launching the Control Center, make sure that you have installed the .NET Framework 2.0 as covered on page 3 of this guide. If for some reason this still doesn't work, you can also install the earlier .NET 1.1 as well, though this shouldn't be necessary. Check to see if the ATI Control Center Runtime libraries are running in the background. To check for this, open Windows Task Manager (CTRL + ALT + DEL) and under the Processes tab check for the presence of one or more CLI.exe. If it is not there after you have started the ATI Catalyst Control Center, follow the procedures in the section above for initiating it by using the 'Restart Runtime' icon.
If you are still having CCC problems, do a full 'clean' installation of the latest Catalyst Driver Package including the new ATI Control Center as detailed on page 4. Finally, make sure you uninstall any tweaking/overclocking/graphics monitoring utilities which may be interfering with the Control Center's launching. You can always attempt to reinstall them later, but it is important that they be removed first before installing the Control Center if you're experiencing problems.
Once the Control Center is open, follow the descriptions below to configure your ATI graphics card settings. Note that the general Display Properties>Advanced options, namely those under the General, Adapter, Monitor, Troubleshoot and Color Management tabs have not changed in function or appearance, and are already covered under the ATI Control Panel section on Page 5. This section only covers the additional settings found when you launch the ATI Catalyst Control Center by pressing the button under the Catalyst Control Center tab:
Views
Basic vs. Advanced View: The first time you open the CCC you will be asked if you want to use Basic or Advanced view. I strongly recommend ticking the Advanced option and also ticking the 'Dont show this page again' box. Basic view is only for extremely novice users, and does not contain the bulk of the settings required to optimize and configure your Catalysts. To confirm that you're in Advanced view, once the ATI CCC opens, click the Views menu button at the top and you will see the 'Advanced View' is ticked.
Custom View: If you want to customize which particular items appear in the Control Center, you can do so by selecting the 'Define a Custom View...' option under the Views drop-down menu. This will open up the Custom View box, under which you will see a table of all the current items displayed in the Control Center (Click the small '+' sign to expand the list). You can then click the small tick mark next to any item to unselect it (remove it from the Control Center), or if a tick is present, it will be displayed. I recommend for the moment that you make sure a tick is placed against every item, and then in the future you can return to remove unneeded items as necessary.
If you have changed any of the items being displayed, the Control Center will automatically use your new Custom View. If you click the Views button you will see the 'Custom View' option is ticked. If you want to return to another view, e.g Advanced View, simply select it and all possible items will return to your Control Center. You can then switch between Custom View and another view as often as you like.
Hotkeys
If you wish to use a range of keyboard shortcuts for various functions of the ATI Control Center, you can assign them by clicking the Hotkeys button at the top of the Control Center and selecting 'Hotkey Manager'. This opens the Hotkeys Manager box, under which you can edit hotkey combinations for particular functions. Note that the 'Enable Hotkeys feature' option must be ticked for Hotkeys to work, and this is related to the ATI Hotkey Poller service discussed under the Tidying Up section on page 4. If you change Control Center functions on a regular basis, you may find hotkeys handy, but in general I believe they are an unnecessary resource drain and can be left disabled on most systems.
Profiles
If you want to use different graphics card settings in different circumstances, the profiles option might come in very handy. However it has changed slightly from the way it worked in the ATI Control Panel, and now has a more useful feature. Click the Profiles button and select 'Profiles Manager' to bring up the Profiles Manager. As before, you can save all your current Control Center settings under as many profiles as you like by entering a profile name in the box under 'Enter or select a profile name', and then click the Save button. However you can now choose which particular settings are saved in the profile, and how they can be applied.
Composition: Under this tab you can select the particular Control Center settings to save for the current profile. If you click the small 'All Catalyst Control Center Settings' button all possible Control Center settings will be saved for the current profile. If you want to ignore certain settings, such as VPU Recover or Video Overlay settings for the current profile, click on the 'the following settings' button, and then you can double-click on the name of your graphics card (if you have only one display, select the first entry) and underneath it you can tick/untick the specific setting areas to add/remove.
Activation: Under this tab you can set the methods by which the profile can be activated (i.e the settings in the profile will be put into effect). There are four possible ways in which a profile can be activated:
System Tray Menu - If you use the ATI Catalyst Control Center System Tray tool then if this option is ticked you can use it to quickly access and activate your profiles.
Hotkey Assignments - If you use the ATI Hotkeys function of the Control Center, then you tick this option to assign hotkeys to activate a profile. You must then select a Hotkey Modifier key, and enter a particular key in the 'Enter a Hotkeys selection' box. This is the key combination which will activate this profile.
Profiles Menu - This item should usually be ticked, as it allows you to access profiles and activate them using the drop-down menu next to the Profiles button in the ATI Control Center. Your profiles will be listed by name under the 'Activate Profile' item of the Profiles drop-down menu.
Desktop Shortcut - This is a very useful way of activating profiles, particularly profiles which apply to particular games or applications. If this option is ticked, when you save a profile this places a special ATI shortcut on your Windows Desktop, which when launched will activate the particular profile associated with it. See the Application tab description below for more details of how to use this feature to create and use different profiles for each game.
Applications: Under this tab you can associate a particular application or game with the profile. You can do this by putting a tick in the 'opens the following application, file or shortcut' box, and then inserting the full path and name of a executable or shortcut using the Browse button. I recommend you select the path to a shortcut, as the Control Center has some issues with launching certain executables properly (e.g Doom3.exe). Unfortunately this method doesn't mean that whenever you run that application or shortcut that the drivers will automatically detect this and run the appropriate profile. That would be extremely useful, but that's not what this does. The closest you can get to that sort of ease-of-use is to tick the 'Desktop Shortcut' option under the Activation tab, then save your profile. You will now find a shortcut on your desktop which, when launched, will start the application or game you've assigned to the profile, and implement all the profile's settings.
One last thing I can recommend in regards to profiles is that you should ideally save your regular "everyday" Control Center settings under a profile with a name like Default or Normal. That way you won't lose it. For more useful game profiles which are automatically detected and used when a game is launched, use ATI Tray Tools instead - see the Advanced Tweaking section for details.
Preferences
When you click the Preferences button, you will find several other options which are covered below:
Always On Top - As the name implies, if ticked, this option forces the ATI Control Center to always remain on top of all other windows when open.
Hide Tooltips - Tooltips are the small grey popup boxes which appear every time you highlight a particular setting or option in the ATI Control Center. These give brief descriptions of each setting. If they annoy you, you can tick this option to remove them.
Hide Toolbar Text - If unticked, this option gives each of the five buttons at the top of the ATI Control Center a text label, such as 'View' and 'Preferences'. If ticked, the buttons remain but their text will be removed. I recommend leaving the text enabled (unticked), at least until you become extremely familiar with the Control Center.
Hide Splash Screen - If ticked, you will not see the 'ATI Catalyst Control Center' small intro screen/box which appears prior to the CCC being opened.
Enable System Tray Menu - As discussed previously, the System Tray menu is another form of quick access to the ATI Control Center, however I personally feel it is an unnecessary use of resources and should be disabled. You can remove it by unticking this option, and instead I recommend using ATI Tray Tools (See Advanced Tweaking section). However if you really must use it, leave a tick here to ensure it loads into memory every time your system starts up and appears in your system tray.
Select Language - If selected, brings up a language selection box, where you can choose the language used for all ATI Control Center interface text.
Select a Skin - If selected, brings up the Skin Select Form box, which allows you to choose a new "skin" (graphical appearance of the dialog boxes) for the ATI Catalyst Control Center. You can choose whichever suits your taste. Some skins may take up slightly more memory, but to be honest the entire Control Panel takes up so much memory, another few MB won't make much of a difference! For minimal resources usage choose the 'System Skin' option which uses the skin shown in the screenshots in this guide.
Restore Factory Defaults - Selecting this option will restore all the default settings for the Control Center. I recommend you only use it if you run into a lot of problems and want to return to defaults settings to "start from scratch".
Help
The Help button allows you to get more help about the Control Centerr functions, and also contains links for more help in troubleshooting your ATI graphics card.
The next page covers the various Graphics Settings in the main part of the ATI Catalyst Control Center.
The ATI Catalyst Control Center (Pt.2)
Welcome
This section only contains a range of Catalyst product features/ads. You can click on the links shown at the bottom right of the main panel to check for updates, contact ATI Customer Care, Send Feedback or visit ATI.com. None of these affect the performance or functionality of the ATI Catalysts on your system.
Information Center
The Information Center section contains details about your graphics card hardware and software. This is very handy for quickly finding out more details about your system, such as the core and memory clock speeds. Note that the information is not comprehensive, and indeed on some systems may show up incorrectly. See the Overclocking and Benching & Stress Testing sections of this guide, as well as the System Specifications chapter of my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion for a range of better tools for finding out more about your ATI graphics card and your entire system.
Displays Manager
This section shows all the displays connected to your system and currently recognized by the drivers. A picture of the primary display will be under the Main box, and if another is connected, under the Secondary box. If you right-click on the picture of the display, you will see the options to Rotate the image from that display, or to Swap Display Mapping - which means to exchange the displays mapped to your primary and secondary displays (i.e. make Display 1 become Display 2 and vice versa), and if you have two displays, the option to Disable one of the displays. If you cannot see a recently connected display device listed, click the 'Detect Displays' button and it should appear in the list. If it doesn't check the cabling and if possible use another type of connection (e.g. swap DVI for D-SUB or vice versa).
The currently selected (typically Main) display will be shown under the Selected Displays section of this screen, with details of the display's model name and connection type (e.g. DVI). You can select how big the Desktop Area will be by choosing a resolution for it. The Color Quality can also be changed, all the way from 32-bit, to 16-bit down to 8-bit. The lower the color quality, the less colors used to display the screen image, and 32-bit is recommended for all users. An important setting is the Refresh Rate box which shows the currently used refresh rate, and allows you to adjust it manually. See the Monitor area under the ATI Control Panel section, as well as the Tidying Up area of the Catalyst Installation and Setup section for more details on the refresh rate, and what you should and shouldn't do with it. If in doubt do not alter the Refresh Rate.
Rotation provides the option to rotate the display through 4 preset angles, with 0 degrees being a normal image, and 180 degrees for example being an upside down image. There is no reason to do this unless you have special requirements, such as correctly displaying an image on a display which is on its side.
Finally, the Force button contains a range of sub-options which allow you to manually force a wider range of settings to the Desktop Resolution, Color Quality, Refresh Rate, Rotation and HDTV properties. There is an inherent danger in doing this, as for example you may assign a refresh rate which exceeds your display's capabilities and thus get no image and perhaps even damage your display device. The main reason you would use these options would be to select a setting which you know works on your system but is not being correctly detected, especially if you want to force an HDTV resolution such as 1920x1080. Exercise caution, and don't mess with this setting unless you know what you're doing. If you want to override Windows XP's default 60Hz refresh rate, try using the refresh rate override, available by right-clicking on the picture of your display under Desktop and Display Setup, then select Device Properties, and then you will have access to the Refresh Rate Override option.
Display Options
The 3D Refresh Rate Override option when enabled allows you to force a game's refresh rate to exceed the default 60Hz. You can do this by selecting 'Same as Desktop' for example, if your Desktop refresh rate is above 60Hz. You can find out much more Refresh Rates at the bottom of page 4 of this guide. Do not alter this setting without understanding what Refresh Rates do, as forcing a non-default refresh rate can result in some games not starting up at all.
The Display Detection Option simply determines at what point the Catalysts will attempt to detect all your display device(s). If you select 'Detect whenever Catalyst Control Center is opened' then it will do exactly that - go through a detection process for any attached displays whenever you open the Control Center. If this annoys you, or if you find the added delay unnecessary - mainly because you don't change your displays constantly - then select the second option 'Use manual detection only (I must click the Detect Displays button)' which is the recommended option for most people.
The Displays Management Options section here also allows for forced detection of any connected televisions (if 'Force TV detection' is ticked). If you display has limited resolution capabilities - that is, if it can only display in certain resolutions - then the default 'List only those modes supported by all displays' is the safest as it ensures you cannot select a display mode which is incompatible with one or more of the displays.
Monitor/Digital Panel Properties
Depending on whether you have a traditional CRT monitor or a Digital flat panel display (e.g. LCD) attached, the settings in this section may be different. See the relevant section below:
Monitor Properties
Attributes: The main area of the Monitor Properties section shows you the details of the particular CRT display(s) you have connected to your machine, including resolution and refresh rate limits. You can select whether you want to tick 'Use Extended Display Identification Data (EDID)', which is recommended if available. This allows your display device to accurately inform the Catalysts about its capabilities, reducing the change of any damage to the monitor from inappropriate resolutions and/or refresh rates. If your monitor doesn't support EDID (which is rare) or you are certain it is incorrectly identifying your monitor's capabilities, untick the box and manually set the maximum resolution and refresh rate.
Adjustments: You can use the arrows on this screen to adjust the screen position and size if the picture on your display is not reaching the edges of the monitor. I recommend resizing and repositioning the image on your screen to ensure that the image evenly touches the four edges of your monitor screen. However ideally you should use the controls on your monitor to resize, reshape and reposition the image to perfectly match the monitor screen. You may have to do this several times, at various resolutions and refresh rates. If then you reach some sort of limitation with the monitor controls, you can use these software controls for further adjustments.
The Horizontal and Vertical synchronization of your monitor are controlled by the settings here. You will typically see a '+' or a '-' sign against the Horizontal and Vertical settings. I strongly advise you not to alter these unless you are directed to by a technical support person, or you know precisely what you are doing. Clicking on the buttons can result in loss of video signal (black screen) and even potential damage to your monitor. In particular, the Composite Sync option combines the vertical and horizontal synchronization signals into one, and is only for composite monitors. Do not click on the blue Composite button unless you are certain you are using a composite monitor.
Troubleshoot: If you know your display device is capable of display modes such as 720p (720 horizontal lines progressive scan) and/or 1080i (1080 horizontal lines interlaced) then you can tick the relevant boxes here to add these modes to the Force button under the Displays Manager section. Do not select these modes if your display device is not capable of such resolutions (as most CRTs aren't), since attempting to use these resolutions may cause damage to your display device if not supported.
Digital Panel Properties
Attributes: This section shows the details of your digital panel's capabilities, including the panel name and connection type, and maximum supported resolution (usually called the 'native' resolution) and refresh rate.
Image Scaling: This section allows you to choose whether to have the images on the screen 'Scale to full panel size', or 'Use centered timings'. For most displays the 'Scale to full panel size' is the best option, however the further away your current resolution is from your display's 'native' resolution, the blurrier the onscreen image will be. Note, you can use the free Microsoft ClearType utility to make text in non-native resolutions much clearer. If you want to force all resolutions to display at your monitor's native resolution - hence providing the sharpest image quality - select the 'Use Centered Timings' option, however note that any resolutions below your native resolution will appear as a centered box on the screen with black borders.
DVI Settings: If your flat panel is connected via DVI cable, you can select the 'Reduce DVI frequency on high-resolution displays' and 'Alternate DVI operational mode' settings to reduce/remove any potential graphical anomalies if running your panel at resolutions above 1280x1024. For most panels however this is not necessary, and both these options should be unticked.
Avivo Color
This section is only available for ATI graphics cards which support per-display color settings, namely the X1000 series. Here you can alter the Hue and Saturation for each display connected to your system. Hue refers to the gradation over the color range, while Saturation refers to the richness/vibrance of a particular color. To put this in simple terms, changing the Hue value changes the actual colors shown - and hence is best not altered. However Saturation is useful to change, as it operates similar to the 'Digital Vibrance' option for Nvidia Forceware drivers - it alters the vibrance of a color. Raising this slightly can greatly improve color reproduction on many displays.
HDTV Support
This section allows you to add 720p, 1080i or 1080p modes to the Displays Manager section. If you are certain your monitor/digital panel supports these modes and they are not being detected properly, tick the relevant box(es) here. If you then get display anomalies when running these higher resolution HDTV modes, you can use the utility at the bottom of this section to adjust the image size/resolution until it fits properly on your display. Remember, if you have any doubts don't enable these options as setting a resolution which exceeds your display's capabilities can damage it.
3D
Unlike the old ATI Control Panel, the Control Center doesn't distinguish between OpenGL and Direct3D for the majority of 3D-related settings. They are combined into one area called '3D', and whatever you select here will apply equally to all games and 3D applications - whether they be OpenGL or Direct3D - except for the 'API Specific' section (see further below). The most interesting feature of the 3D section is that there is a moving 3D preview in the main panel, showing a car driving down a road. The 3D graphics used for this preview will adjust in real time (often with a bit of jerkiness or pausing) to reflect the changes you are making in the 3D settings. Pay particular attention to this 3D preview to see changes in subtle details, like the way the double-yellow lines on the road become crisper into the distance as more Anisotropic Filtering is used, or the way the jagged lines around the car become smoother with Antialiasing, or even the way the landscape becomes blurrier or sharper with different Mipmap and Texture preference settings. If you want a closer look at the 3D Preview, double-click on it and it will switch to a full-screen view for easier viewing of details. Press ESC to return to the normal Control Center view. To enable/disable this preview, click the small play/pause button at the top right of the preview screen. If the 3D preview causes problems (by lagging your mouse for example), you can remove it by clicking the X button at the top right of the preview screen.
Click to enlarge
There are several sections under the 3D options, and each is covered below:
Standard Settings: If you are awfully lazy, and just don't have the time or patience to change a whole bunch of settings you can simply use this universal slider to adjust your graphics card's settings between either Performance or Quality modes. I don't recommend this method whatsoever - take the time to adjust all the settings individually for optimal performance and image quality: tick the 'Use custom settings box' and follow the advice below.
Anti-Aliasing: It is recommended that you tick the 'Let the application decide' box, so that Antialiasing (AA) settings within particular games do not conflict with your Control Center settings. However if you really want to force a particular level of AA in all 3D games, disable any in-game AA then untick the box and use the slider here to force a particular level of Antialiasing. From 2x to 4x to 6x sample rate, the higher the level of Antialiasing, the less jagged the lines in games and 3D applications will appear, however the lower your performance will be. For a full description and screenshot comparisons, see my Gamer's Graphics & Display Settings Guide. Note that Crossfire users will see more options here if Crossfire mode is enabled (See Crossfire further below).
Temporal Antialiasing: A more recent setting for ATI graphics cards is Temporal Antialiasing, a setting which I don't cover in my guide above - so I'll cover it here. For a technical description of Temporal Antialiasing, try this description, but essentially it is a driver trick designed to give the effect of a higher level of Antialiasing, but with a lower performance hit. For example, if you enable Temporal Antialiasing and select 2x on the Antialiasing sample slider, during a game given the right conditions (high framerates) it will look almost exactly like 4x Antialiasing, but with the performance impact of only 2x Antialiasing. Since the image quality of Temporal Antialiasing cannot be captured properly in a screenshot, the only way to determine if you like it or not is to try it yourself.
Remember, if you want to disable Antialiasing (for fastest performance), or if you simply want to determine the level of Antialiasing using the settings in a particular game, you can tick the 'Let the application decide' box, and the ATI Control Center will not force any Antialiasing on any game or 3D app. This is the recommended option since most games now have separate Antialiasing settings, and often if you try to force Antialiasing on them using the Control Center it will cause conflicts and slowdowns.
Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: This is an Antialiasing technique which improves the appearance of scenes which contain transparent textures. Enabling it will result in varying image quality and performance impacts depending on whether you choose the 'Quality' or 'Performance' mode. Some details and screenshots can be found here and here. As of the 6.5 Catalysts, all Radeon 9550 graphics cards or higher can use Adaptive AA. In general the performance impact should not be significant over normal Antialiasing, but it still does reduce FPS when enabled, so untick it if you need the additional framerate.
Anisotropic Filtering: This graphics method sharpens textures as they fade into the distance. Once again, you can find a full, easy-to-understand description of it at the bottom of this page of my Gamer's Graphics & Display Settings Guide along with screenshots showing the differences between different levels of Anisotropic Filtering. Note that you can select Performance or Quality modes for Anisotropic Filtering - Performance mode is Bilinear Filtering, while Quality mode is Trilinear Filtering - the difference between them is negligible in terms of image quality, but Performance mode provides several extra FPS if Anisotropic Filtering is used in a game, so it is recommended. Again, if you wish to disable Anisotropic Filtering, or more importantly allow individual game settings to determine it, tick the 'Let the application decide' box, which is recommended. Most recent games have some sort of 'Texture Filtering' or Anisotropic Filtering-related option which should be used instead of this setting to prevent conflicts or problems.
Catalyst A.I: Catalyst A.I. allows users to determine the level of 'optimizations' they enable in graphics applications. These optimizations are graphics 'short cuts' which the Catalyst A.I. calculates to attempt to improve the performance of 3D games without any noticeable reduction in image quality. In the past there has been a great deal of controversy about 'hidden optimizations', where both Nvidia and ATI were accused of cutting corners, reducing image quality in subtle ways by reducing image precision for example, simply to get higher scores in synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark. In response to this, both ATI and Nvidia have made the process transparent to a great extent. You can select whether you want to enable or disable Catalyst A.I. for a further potential performance boost in return for possibly a slight reduction in image quality in some cases. You can choose the aggressiveness of such optimizations, either Standard or Advanced on the slider. The Advanced setting ensures maximum performance, and usually results in no problems or noticeable image quality reduction, so it is recommended you enable Catalyst AI and set it to Advanced. If on the other hand you want to always ensure the highest image quality at all costs, disable Catalyst A.I. (tick the 'Disable Catalyst A.I.' box). I recommend leaving Catalyst A.I enabled unless you experience problems, as many application-specific optimizations for recent games such as Oblivion are dependant on Catalyst AI being enabled.
Note: As of the 6.7 Catalysts, Crossfire users should set Catalyst A.I. to Advanced to force Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) mode in all Direct3D games for optimal performance. Once again, Catalyst A.I. should only be disabled if you notice image corruption in particular games.
Mipmap Detail Level: This slider helps determine how good textures look, when combined with your game's own texture settings. By moving the slider to the right, textures should appear sharper and more detailed, but performance is reduced. By lowering this slider you may see texture anomalies in particular games, so increase the slider if that is the case. I recommend leaving this slider at the far right, and adjusting mipmap/texture detail levels in individual games to minimize graphical anomalies.
The next page continues the description of the Catalyst Control Center.
The ATI Catalyst Control Center (Pt.3)
All Settings: If you find that changing settings with the Preview screen visible is driving you nuts due to long pauses and jerkiness, then you might want to adjust your 3D settings using this option. Just click this option and in place of the Preview screen will appear all the setting sliders and tick boxes for you to adjust as discussed above. Importantly, there is an significant additional option under the All Settings section which is not available elsewhere in the Control Center:
Wait for Vertical Refresh: This option controls Vertical Synchronization in games, and there are four choices here:
Always Off - Vertical Sync will always be set to Off, regardless of the setting in the game or 3D application. This provides fastest performance but may result in image "tearing" which can be annoying to some.
Off, Unless Application Specifies - Vertical Sync will be off by default, however if you choose to enable it in a game or 3D application, it will be enabled for that game/app. This is the recommended mode.
On, Unless Application Specifies - Same as above, except Vertical Sync will be on by default unless otherwise disabled in a particular game or 3D application.
Always On - Vertical Sync will always remain on, regardless of the setting in the game or 3D application. This is not recommended, as it may reduce performance however it guarantees that there will never be any screen "tearing".
It is recommended you select the 'Off, Unless Application Specifies' option for the best performance, and this also allows you to set VSync Off/On in each individual game using the game's settings. Generally speaking, VSync should be disabled for the best performance.
API Specific: Even though the new ATI Control Center doesn't distinguish between OpenGL and Direct3D in the bulk of the 3D settings, there are still some settings which are unique to OpenGL and Direct3D respectively, and they are covered here.
Direct3D Settings
Enable geometry instancing - Geometry instancing basically optimizes the rendering of objects which appear multiple times in a 3D scene by uploading one instance of the object and then replicating that as many times as needed. For example, with geometry instancing enabled, outdoor scenes with 3D objects like leaves, bushes and grass should be rendered faster, since the geometry for only one instance of a blade of grass is calculated and then reproduced over and over to create a field of grass. You should enable this option to improve performance in such cases, and only disable it if you notice graphical anomalies with multiple objects of the same type.
Support DXT texture formats - DXT is DirectX Texture Compression, which compresses textures into smaller sizes, making them easier to load into Video Memory and hence speeding up graphics performance with minimal loss in the quality of textures. It is strongly recommended that you make sure this option is enabled (ticked) to support DXT texture formats for maximum performance.
Alternate Pixel Center - This setting changes where the center of each pixel originates, and that can resolve problems such as texture or text anomalies in games. You should leave this Disabled unless you experience precisely those sort of problems.
OpenGL Settings
Triple Buffering - Set this option to Enabled to improve overall performance when VSync is enabled. However using Triple Buffering may cause problems for graphics cards with lower Video RAM, so disable this option if you’re experiencing problems such as mouse or input lag. See the Advanced Tweaking section for more details.
Force 24-bit Z-Buffer depth- The Z-Buffer controls the rendering of depth in 3D games, such as which objects are hidden behind others when viewed at a distance. Greater precision for the Z-Buffer means less chance of visual errors, which often appear in the form of objects showing through each other, or having missing or flashing bits. This option allows you to force 24-bit Z-Buffer precision, however I don't recommend ticking this option, as the Z-Buffer precision should normally be left to be determined by each game. If you do see a lot of errors and glitches in distant objects in games, you can try forcing a higher Z-Buffer depth, but this typically reduces performance.
Color
If you believe you don't have appropriate color and brightness on your monitor when displaying the Windows desktop, or in particular games, you should firstly make sure you have the correct Color Profile for your monitor installed (See Color Management section). If this does not resolve any problems, you can manually change the color and brightness/contrast/gamma settings for your Desktop and/or 3D games in this section. The first choice you have to make is whether you want to adjust these settings for your Windows Desktop (Select the 'Desktop' option), or for 3D Applications (Select the 'Full Screen 3D' option).
Next, you can select whether you want to change the Gamma, Brightness and Contrast properties of the Red, Green and Blue colors individually (Select the Red, Green, or Blue option) or for all of them at once (Select 'All Channels'). For each color, or for all colors, you can then move the Gamma, Brightness and Contrast sliders to the left or right to adjust the properties as appropriate. If you want to reset your choice for a particular slider, click the Reset button next to it. If you want to reset all your changes back to the 'normal' values, click the Defaults button. For most people I recommend using the default values here and adjusting your monitor's controls to achieve optimal color and brightness/contrast.
(Avivo) Video
Click to enlarge
This section allows you to change the display properties of any video media which you may play through your PC. There is a video preview of a waving ATI flag which allows you to see the effects of your settings. There are three sub-sections to the Video Settings section, and each is covered below:
Standard Settings: You can select a preset video playback configuration from here. The presets include Home, Office, and Theater. If you're not happy with one of the presets, use the Video Wizard button to go through a set of steps to select optimal video settings, or use the settings below to customize them further (shown as Custom in the Preset box).
Adjustments: The overlay options in this section of the Control Center determine the brightness, contrast, saturation, hue and gamma settings for any image which displays through a video overlay, such as DVD playback. Changing these sliders will adjust the properties of the image and you can immediately see the impact of these on the right side video preview. Set to suit your tastes, but if you don't like your changes, select the Discard button at the bottom and tick the 'Let the application control the video adjustments'.
Theater Mode: These settings work if you have an ATI graphics card which is capable of supporting a Primary and Secondary display, and the secondary display is connected. Clone Mode produces an identical image of your primary display on the secondary display. Standard mode shows video playback on your Primary display only. 'Theater mode' shows video playback on both Primary and Secondary displays, with the Secondary display showing the video playback in full screen. You can see a preview of the impact of these choices on the Video Preview panel.
If you select 'Theater Mode' from the list above, you can select the aspect ratio of the video playback here. Aspect Ratio is the width of the image versus the height of the image. 4:3 ratio is standard TV/monitor size, while 16:9 is the standard Widescreen format, such as that used in most DVD movies and HDTVs. If you select 'Match the source video', then if the source is 4:3 aspect ratio, so too will the playback be in 4:3. Alternatively, if you want to change the video's aspect ratio to match to your display's aspect ratio, select the 'Scale to full screen' option, however note that this may cause skewing/distortion of the image.
Deinterlacing: The Catalysts come with software deinterlacing which can help improve the image quality of videos depending on the method you choose. The options available are Auto-Detect, Bob, Motion Adaptive, Vector Adaptive and Weave (No deinterlacing). You will have to experiment to select the right type for your particular video source, but look at the preview display to see an indication of the various impacts. If in doubt, select 'Auto Detect'.
All Settings: This section is similar to that under the 3D section of the Control Panel - it allows you to view and change all the Video settings in one place, without a video preview. However it also contains an additional option 'Windows Media Video Acceleration'. If this option is ticked, it uses your graphics hardware to improve WMV-encoded video playback - which is recommended.
SmartGart
The settings here have a significant impact on your system stability, and to some degree on your performance, if you run an AGP graphics card.
Set AGP Speed: This setting only applies to AGP graphics cards, not PCI-E cards. AGP Speed is detailed under the BIOS Section above. Your current AGP speed is shown here, and you can manually change it by using the slider. Note that certain AGP Speeds may be greyed out, either because they offer significantly lower performance, or because your motherboard and/or graphics card do not support those speeds. It is recommended that you set the highest available AGP Speed here for optimal performance. If at any time you begin experiencing lots of crashes, freezes and other problems, you can reduce the AGP Speed here in an attempt to increase system stability. Also make sure the AGP speed set here matches the one you set in your BIOS.
Fast Write: This setting is detailed under the BIOS section above, and is essentially the same as the BIOS setting of the same name. Your current Fast Write setting (On or Off) is shown here. As mentioned earlier, Fast Write is a major source of instability on most systems and provides little to no performance benefit, so it is strongly recommended that you select Off here to disable Fast Writes.
AGP Read, AGP Write, PCI Read, PCI Write: These settings are covered in detail under the Advanced SmartGart area of the Catalyst Installation and Setup section. However for optimal performance you should ensure they are all set to On.
Retest: If you click this option next to any of these settings, or the 'Retest All' button, the SmartGart system will retest the setting(s) in an attempt to find the "best" settings. Of course this means it will revert the setting(s) to exactly the same as it was when you first opened the SmartGart tab, so there should be no reason for you to use this option unless you want to return to the default settings.
Importantly, if you have changed any of these settings, clicking the Apply button may require that you reboot your system to implement the changes. Once you reboot, come back into the ATI Control Center and check these settings under the SmartGart section. If they haven't changed, it is highly likely you will need to re-enable the ATI Smart service, install the latest motherboard AGP driver and alter other important settings such as those in your BIOS (See relevant sections above).
VPU Recover
Enable VPU Recover: VPU Recover attempts to stop any sort of graphics-related crashes or freezes from completely locking up or resetting your machine. While this is a valiant idea, in practice VPU Recover has been known to increase the probability of problems and crashes itself when enabled, and more importantly using VPU Recover regularly is a sign that something is wrong with your system and you need to find the source of the problem. I recommend that you untick (disable) VPU Recover to increase system stability, and then seek out and remedy the source of any problems by using the tips in the rest of this guide, such as those in the Troubleshooting section below, and the tips in the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion. A stable system will never trigger VPU Recover.
Prepare an Error Report: If VPU Recover is enabled, this option will be available to be ticked. If ticked, it means that every time your system has an error which VPU Recover helps recover from, an email will be generated which you can send to ATI disclosing the details of the problem. While this may help ATI in determining the cause of certain issues, more often than not it is completely unnecessary and I recommend unticking this option, even if you do use VPU Recover.
ATI OverDrive
If you have a Radeon XT or X1000 series graphics card, then you will find a Performance section in the Control Center Graphics Settings, with OverDrive the main component underneath it. The OverDrive panel provides information about the current temperature of your graphics card's Graphics Processing Unit (the GPU or Core) which is only possible due to the presence of a temperature sensor on XT-based graphics cards. This is the reason why non-XT/X1000 cards do not have Overdrive, because it requires the physical presence of this temperature diode onboard the card itself.
If you tick 'Enable Overdrive', the OverDrive software will actively monitor your graphics card's temperature and allow you to manually overclock your video card's GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) core/engine speed as well as the memory if it is safe to do so. This is a nice method of achieving some extra performance safely, since OverDrive will not allow your graphics card to fry by overclocking it to insane speeds. If you want to overclock your system see the Overclocking section for more details.
A common question asked by users is "What is a safe temperature for my graphics card?" This varies depending on the particular graphics card series you have, since each is based on a particular architecture and hence has different heat output and tolerances. Typically, under most circumstances the 50-60 degree (Celcius) range is considered quite normal at idle, increasing into the high 70s under load. These temperatures will rise when overclocking or when your system is not properly cooled, and can result in crashes and freezes when under load. See the Overclocking section for more information on cooling.
Finally, note that some ATI graphics cards still don't come with OverDrive capability, such as All In Wonder cards. If you believe you should be seeing the OverDrive tab in the Control Center but it's not there, make sure to remember that the ATI Hotkey Poller service needs to be set to Automatic (See Tidying Up section above), and if necessary contact ATI Technical Support for more help.
Crossfire
If you have two ATI graphics cards, with at least one being a Crossfire Edition graphics card, and they are installed in an appropriate Crossfire-supported motherboard (with both PCI-E Slots enabled in the BIOS), and you're using the correct connecting cable between the two cards, you should be able to see the Crossfire tab in the Catalyst Control Center. You can then tick the 'Enable Crossfire' box to enable Crossfire usage - it should be disabled for any games in which you notice performance problems or glitches. It is recommended that you then make sure Catalyst AI is enabled (See further above) so that the Catalyst drivers can automatically set the correct Crossfire mode for each game. Note that with Crossfire enabled, you will be able to access additional Crossfire Antialiasing modes under the Antialiasing section of the 3D options in the CCC - up to 14x Antialiasing.
Once you're done changing all the Catalyst Control Center settings to suit your preferences, make sure you click the Apply button at the bottom of the Control Center box to apply them. In fact get used to pressing the Apply button after almost every change so you can see the impacts of it more quickly. Now is also a good time to click the Profiles button and create a new profile called Default (or similar), to keep all your preferred original settings from being lost.
The next section starts our look at Advanced Tweaking with ATI Tray Tools.
Advanced Tweaking
This section delves into the types of things you can do outside the normal ATI Control Panel/Control Center settings, both to improve your graphics performance and/or to alter image quality to suit your tastes and perhaps resolve specific graphics problems. Please note that if you are not confident in undertaking these tweaks - and certainly none of them is necessary for you to enjoy games - then do not perform them. There is a certain level of risk involved in changing some of these settings, and I again refer you to the Taking Precautions section of this guide for things you should do prior to implementing such changes.
ATI Tray Tools
The tool we will focus on in this section is ATI Tray Tools, and in effect the following two pages are about how to use this fantastic free utility. It is a comprehensive utility which not only allows you to change all the normal ATI Catalyst settings, but also provides a huge range of additional features which are covered below. Of course I can't do a complete rundown of every single one of ATI Tray Tool's many features in two pages of this guide, but I detail all of the most important and useful features here and provide recommendations. For more details of ATI Tray Tool's functionality, and/or to answer any questions you might have, try the Official ATI Tray Tools Forum.
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Installation & General Options
To start with, when installing ATI Tray Tools (hereby referred to as ATT), it is generally recommended that you choose the Full installation, which includes a range of components such as Smart Shader files, 3D profiles and Plugins. Note however that if you don't wish to have ATT put itself into your right-click context menus, untick the 'Windows Shell Integration' item. You can also remove the 'Autostart with Windows' option if you don't use ATT's overclocking or game profile options often for example - you can always reenable this option later if necessary anyway (see below). On the next page of the Installation Configuration Options, you should leave all the options unticked (for maximum functionality) except the 'Enable old I2C control system', and if you also know you won't be overclocking, you can choose to tick the 'Disable Overclocking' option. From there, finalize the installation as normal. Note that the version of ATT which comes with the Omega Drivers may be slightly different to the details provided here.
Once ATT is installed, it will appear in your System Tray icon area - the lower right corner of your Windows Desktop, next to the clock. It is shown as red ATI cube icon, and right-clicking on it will bring up a range of menu options (see the screenshot above). Most of these are covered below, but to undertake some basic configuration of ATT, go to the 'Tools & Options' menu and select the 'General Options' item. A new dialog box will open with four tabs:
General: Here I suggest ticking the 'Use new Apply 3D Settings mode' and 'Aggressive 3D detection'. The remaining options are up to you as they mainly rely on your preferences. For example, if you want to open the main ATI Tray Tools menu using a left-click instead of a right-click of the mouse, tick the 'Swap mouse buttons for tray menu' item. Importantly, as mentioned you can tick whether ATT loads up with Windows or not at the top of this box. In general if you only use ATT to adjust various Catalyst settings and make a few Registry tweaks, it's not necessary for it to load up at startup - you can launch it manually whenever you want to use it. However if you use particular functions like an Overclocking Profile or Game Profile then it's best to simply let ATT loadup at Windows startup, and the Registry method is fine. Remember, ATT doesn't have to be running in the background for the basic 3D graphics options to work, like the 'Flip Queue Size', as these are changes recorded in the registry and don't require the active presence of ATT in memory to work.
Advanced: I recommend ticking the 'Enable ATT Shared Memory' feature, as it is required for functions like the FlashOSD option (see Onscreen Display on the next page). If you're overclocking using ATT, you can enable the overclocking limits to prevent from severely overclocking or underclocking the card and hence causing damage or poor performance. If you only want your new clock rates to work while ATT is running, tick the 'Reset clocks on exit' to go back to default speeds once ATT is closed; similar if you want your overclock to be removed before going into Suspend mode, tick the 'Reset clocks before suspend mode'. Finally, at the bottom of this box I recommend ticking the 'Always select maximum refresh rate' so that you get the optimal refresh rate at any new resolution you switch to.
Audio Recorder: This functionality is obviously not directly relevant to your graphics card, and is one of the added features of ATT which you can experiment with. You can choose a variety of sources to record audio from, including Videos, and you can save these recording to a particular folder in the format you prefer (e.g. MP3).
Screenshots: Again, not directly related to driver functionality, this is an additional - but useful - function of ATT: the ability to take screenshots during games by using a specified Hotkey. I personally use FRAPS to take screenshots in games, however ATT doesn't have the same limitations as the free version of FRAPS does in terms of image formats, so you may prefer it.
Basic Functionality
This section covers the basic functionality of ATT which I consider the most commonly used and/or the most important.
3D
To start with - and this is one of the reasons why ATI Tray Tools is so popular - you can access all of the major features available in the regular Catalyst Control Center within the 3D section of ATT. This means that you can simply install the basic ATI graphics drivers without installing the Catalyst Control Center as well, and then use ATT to quickly and easily change the required Catalyst settings, without the added background resource usage of the CCC.
Since the settings in this section are identical to those of the same name in the Catalyst Control Center section, I recommend that you refer to that section of this guide for more details. Note that if you don't wish to use the ATT menu items to access these settings, go to the 3D section of ATT and select the Settings item. This opens up a separate '3D Settings' dialog box to access all of the 3D settings more easily. Note further that there are a few additions to the 3D settings which are not included in the regular CCC, and these are covered below:
Flip Queue Size: This setting is similar to the 'Max Frames to Render Ahead' Nvidia setting which has been made famous by Oblivion (See page 13 of my Oblivion Tweak Guide). It works in much the same way, controlling the number of frames which are rendered and held in advance of being displayed. The default is 3, or Undefined, however by lowering this setting you may be able to resolve mouse lag problems, and even prevent graphics freezes in certain games. Experiment by setting this value to 2 first, and then if necessary try an extreme value like 0. For most people however I recommend either 3, 2 or 1 at the lowest as setting a value of 0 can disable the performance benefits of dual core CPUs for example, and in general lowering this setting will reduce overall FPS the lower the setting. You can try raising it if you want to see if you can gain performance, however again you may experience mouse lag or input lag.
Anisotropic/Trilinear Filtering Optimizations: If you want the fastest performance when using Anisotropic or Trilinear texture filtering in a game, you should enable both these options. This may result in a slight drop in image quality, however for most games this should not be noticeable, and in return you should gain some extra FPS.
Smart Shader Effects: These were available in the official Catalysts, and basically allow you to add a range of effects to game image output. Most of them are only for novelty value. Note that there is a separate shader option for Smart Shader under the 3D Additional (Direct3D) tab, and under the OpenGL tab, as they each only apply to their relevant API. For example, under the OpenGL tab you can enable the 'HDRish' smart shader which provides an HDR-like effect to OpenGL games like Quake 4. Generally speaking however you should stick to not using any smart shader effects for optimal performance and image quality.
Finally, if you want to use custom 3D setting profiles, you can select one under the '3D Profiles' menu. For example the 'Max Speed' profile automatically configures the various 3D settings to give you maximum possible speed at the cost of image quality. Generally not recommended; best if you work out which setting does what with the help of guides like this and set them according to your personal preference for eye-candy vs performance. You can of course save your own custom profile by using the Profile box at the bottom of the 3D Settings screen.
Game Profiles
Another benefit of ATI Tray Tools is that you can create custom game profiles; that is you can create profiles for each game you run specifying different 3D settings for that game. This is a feature available in the regular Nvidia Forceware drivers, but ATI has neglected to include it in the official ATI CCC. While the Catalyst Control Center can provide game profiles, you need to create custom icons for them to work. The difference is that so long as ATI Tray Tools is loaded in the background, whenever you launch a game, the game executable is detected and the relevant profile is applied automatically. You don't have to create a custom icon for the game, but of course ATT also allows this method if it's what you prefer. To create a game profile, select the 'Game Profile' item in the ATT main menu. This will open the 'Game Profile' dialog box. The basic procedure to create a custom game profile is covered below:
1. In the Executable box, click the folder icon and browse to the executable file for the game you wish to create the profile for. Remember that some games have an executable which is actually just a launcher, and the game executable itself is named different. We need the actual game executable, not the .exe file which opens a config utility or menu prior to launching the game. Once you've chosen what you think is the correct executable, back in ATT click the 3D icon next to the folder icon on the same line as the Executable box - you should see the game API type (e.g. DirectX8.0) shown, indicating it is indeed the right .exe file to use.
2. In the Parameters box, enter any additional parameters you may be using or which may be needed as the game is launched. To find these out, go to the game's launch icon, right-click on it, select Proprties and check the Target box for any additional text after the last " mark. For example, in Quake4 you might want to use the parameters +set com_allowconsole 1 +disconnect - add those in this box.
3. Tick the 'Set 3D to' box, then in the box next to it, select either a preset profile, or if you want to create a brand new one, select Custom and click the Edit button. In the 3D proprties box which opens, set up all the parameters you want for this particular game, then click the OK button. These settings will only be used for this particular game.
4. Tick the 'Restore previous settings after game end' to make sure that after the game has been closed, your regular Catalyst preferences are restored again.
5. Back at the top of this dialog box, enter a name in the 'Profile Name' box. Typically the name of the game is appropriate. At the bottom of the dialog box, click the Save button and profile will be saved.
Now whenever you launch that particular game through its normal game icon, as long as ATT is running in the background (i.e. you can see its icon in the system tray), then it will automatically detect the game executable and apply your profile settings to the game. Alternatively, if you don't want to keep ATT running in the background, click the 'Create Desktop Shortcut' button in the Game Profile dialog box and a new icon will be created on your desktop for this game profile. Whenever you launch the icon, ATT and the relevant game with its profile will be automatically started - you won't need to have ATT load at startup or be resident in memory before launching the game through this icon.
Note that you can further customize game profiles by checking under the Hardware, Additional and Direct3D Tweaks tabs of the Game Profiles dialog box. The more important of these are covered below:
Exit from ATT after finish: If you want ATT to be closed and removed from memory after you have exited the game, tick the 'Exit from ATT after finish'. This is particularly handy if you're using the Desktop icon method, which means you don't have to have ATT staying in the background either before or after using a particular game profile - it only loads itself up when you launch that game profile icon, and it automatically closes itself after you have exited the game.
Disable OSD Support: If you want to disable the On Screen Display (OSD) that ATT shows during a 3D game, such as the FPS counter, tick the 'Disable OSD support' box under the Additional tab and it will be removed for this game. See the On Screen Display section on the next page for more details.
Change Adapter Identification: If you want to try to trick a Direct3D 9.0 game into thinking you have another graphics card, you can tick the Enable box under this option under the 'Direct3D Tweaks' tab, then enter the device name, or if you know the particular DeviceID in Hex form, enter it here. Clearly this may not always work, and even if it does, if your graphics card doesn't have hardware support for particular features in a game it will either crash, or experience severe glitching.
Force to use Triple Buffers: This option can be important if you use Video Synchronization (VSync) in any games. Whenever you enable VSync in a game, you will get better image quality due to the removal of "tearing": that is, when the top and bottom halves of the image go out of alignment, especially during fast turning motions for example. However if you enable VSync your average FPS also drops sometimes by up to 50%, because of the way your graphics card waits for data to be synchronized before displaying it on your monitor. The only way to enable VSync and be rid of tearing, yet at the same time not have to worry about reduced framerates in Direct3D games is to enable this Triple Buffering option (the main 3D Triple Buffering option only works for OpenGL games). However if you enable Triple Buffering on a graphics card with less Video RAM, you may experience mouse lag, so if you use VSync enable this option first, then disable it (and preferably disable VSync too) if you experience mouse lag.
Remember again that any time you change the game profile options to click the Save button to save changes to the Profile.
Hardware
This section of the ATT main menu accesses a range of overclocking and hardware monitoring functions.
Overclocking Settings: This option opens up the Overclocking dialog box, which allows you to view and alter your graphics card's Core and Memory clock speeds. For more detail of clock speeds and overclocking see the Overclocking section of this guide. Note that ATT comes with two basic tools for testing whether your overclock is stable - a separate 3D Renderer screen with a spinning 3D image which can be used to show artifacts (visual glitches), and also to run benchmarks on. Just because you don't get any artifacts when running this screen, does not in any way mean that your overclock is stable. Refer to the Benching & Stress Testing section of this guide for the correct way to benchmark and stress test your graphics card - overclocked or not - to check for performance and stability changes. The Timings tab of the Overclocking dialog box is much more dangerous, and should not be altered unless you know what you're doing; lowering graphics card memory timings can improve performance but it can also severely destabilize/corrupt your graphics so is best left untouched. The Fan tab allows you to control Fan speeds, but only on graphics cards which are built to allow variable fan speeds.
Auto Overclocking: This feature allows you to control when your overclocked settings are applied. By selecting which events can trigger your overclocked speeds to be implemented or removed, you can for example run normal speeds during 2D applications, then implement a higher clock speed when running a 3D application like a game. After all, there is no point running an overclocked GPU for 2D desktop usage, as this increases heat output for no discernable performance impact. Go through the Auto Overclocking dialog box and select the profiles you want to use for particular events.
Hardware Settings: Selecting the Hardware>General Settings option opens up a dialog box which allows you to specify whether you want the settings you have chosen in the Hardware section to be implemented each time you start Windows. Tick this only if you're certain that the changes you have made are stable.
PCI Latency: This is a reasonaly important but misunderstood option available under the Hardware>General Settings dialog box, and hence deserves its own explanation. While changing PCI Latency can be useful in smoothing out your overall performance, preventing stuttering in games for example, it is not a performance maximizing tool as such. For example, if your AGP graphics card has a high PCI Latency of 248 clocks, lowering its latency may actually reduce your overall framerate slightly but can improve smoothness. This is because PCI Latency is the amount of time which a particular AGP/PCI device has exclusive access to the main system information pathway (or 'Bus'). Some devices need higher clocks because they are transferring larger amounts of information. Graphics cards are a good example, and in most recent games the graphics card would require longer bus access than say the sound card. In general I recommend that you allow graphics cards to at least have a latency of 128. You can experiment with other values of course, but write down your original latencies first. Note that yo umust tick the 'Apply Hardware Settings at Startup' both to access this setting, and to make it work the next time you reboot. Finally, note that PCI latency doesn't apply to newer PCI-Express devices.
The SmartGart and System Information items are the same as those of regular Catalyst CCC, so they aren't covered again here. The Motherboard Monitor tool, and the Monitoring Graphs function are yet another useful feature of ATI Tray Tools. These allow you to view information about your system such as fan speeds, CPU and motherboard temperatures, and a range of voltages. You can then graph a variety of system diagnostics over time to see how they change, for example how your CPU or GPU temps change while you're playing a game.
The next page continues the description of ATI Tray Tools functionality.
Advanced Tweaking (Pt 2)
Tweaks
This section of ATT is quite comprehensive and contains a range of Standard and Advanced Tweaks, some of which we will cover here, others which require you to experiment and test depending on your situation. Unfortunately there simply isn't enough room to cover them all in this guide, I'm also not familiar with all of the settings, and finally most of them are not particularly useful in normal circumstances. However once again it's great that ATI Tray Tools provides us with a means of easily accessing them if required.
Standard Tweaks
Override Pixel/Vertex Shader Version: These two options allow you to set a Shader level lower than your current maximum supported shader version. This can be useful in some games which don't allow you to alter the shader level within the game itself, but adjust their graphics for different shader levels. For example, if you set a card which has 2.0 shader support to override this and force 1.1 shaders, it will run some games more quickly at the cost of some image quality loss. However note that certain games will not run on lower shaders - they require a particular level of shader as a minimum - or they will display visual glitches if forced to use lower level shaders. Note, you should also always tick the 'Optimize Pixel Shader Code' box for maximum shader performance regardless of the version you're using.
Geometry Instancing: This is covered in the Catalyst Control Center section of the guide, and should be enabled in most cases.
Force Mip-Map Filter: Enabling this option improves the quality of textures in some games, although ideally you should use the regular Mipmap Detail Level setting to control Mipmap quality.
Z Compression: Controls the compression of the information held in the Z-Buffer. By enabling higher levels of compression (such as 'High'), you will see a performance improvement, but you may also see graphical anomalies. Default is the normal and recommended option, as it already provides some level of compression without image quality loss.
Fast Z Clear Enable: If enabled this option increases performance by clearing the Z-Buffer more quickly. As such it should always be enabled (ticked). Only untick this option if you experience Z-Buffer-related problems and want to experiment to see if this is the cause of it. Disabling Fast Z Clear will reduce performance noticeably.
Z Mask: Z Mask when enabled uses your graphics card hardware to prevent the Z-Buffer from being filled with unnecessary information. Strangely, many users report faster performance with Z Mask disabled (unticked), as well as less likelihood of graphical anomalies, so I recommend unticking this option to begin with to see if it works for you.
Z Top Disable: I am unclear what this option does, but it is unticked by default.
VPU Recover: Same as the ATI setting of the same name, see Catalyst Control Center section of this guide. Recommened that it be disabled (unticked).
Disable DMA Copy: I am unclear what this option does, but it is unticked by default.
Disable Block Write: Using Block Write should result in faster writing of graphics information to the VRAM, but some people report performance issues with it enabled (unticked) as it may be queing information instead of writing it immediately. So if you want to experiment, untick this option, try your favorite games or graphics benchmark and see if performance has improved or decreased for you. I recommend leaving it ticked by default.
WMV Acceleration: This setting is available in the regular CCC. It should be enabled to provide hardware accelerated Windows Media Video playback.
Advanced Registry Tweaks
There are 7 sections to this part of ATT, and there are a wide range of options here. Just like the Standard Tweaks above, these settings are held in the Registry, and ATT simply reads them from there. If they are currently enabled, the box next to the value's name will show a tick. If they are disabled, the box will be blank. If there is no set value (e.g. the registry item doesn't exist in your registry), then the box will be blocked in. I provide details of all the known and/or important settings below, and if you have good working knowledge of what the others do (or corrections to the list below), please Email Me.
Important: Altering some of these settings may be detected as a cheat by online anti-cheat software such as PunkBuster. Please keep track of the changes you make here, and keep them in mind if you are continually kicked from a game server with a PB warning.
Advanced Direct3D Tweaks
As the title suggests, these tweaks only work in Direct3D games, and have no impact on OpenGL games. Fortunately most games are Direct3D; there are very few OpenGL games (Doom3/Quake4 is OpenGL).
Fog Options: There are a range of Fog-related options here, including the option to enable hardware support for Table Fog, W Fog, Z Fog, Vertex Fog and Discrete Fog. For all intents and purposes you shouldn't need to manually enable/disable these, as your graphics card hardware should automatically provide support for the appropriate fog rendering method a game requires. However if the fog effects in a particular game look odd or incorrect - especially older games - I suggest firstly making sure Table Fog (Pixel Fog) support is enabled, then W Fog, and finally enable the other options if you still have problems. These options are really only for troubleshooting purposes.
Export W Buffer: This option enables W Buffer support for games which use it. The W Buffer is an alternate depth rendering technique to the Z Buffer. You should tick this, however ticking this option doesn't force-enable the W Buffer on recent ATI cards because they may not have hardware support for W Buffer usage in the first place.
Fast Color Clear: Enabling this should result in improved performance without noticeable image quality drop, as color information is cleared more quickly from the frame buffer. However it should already be enabled by default in the hardware, even if not indicated here.
VoltxEnable: This option controls support for Volumetric Textures, which should be enabled.
Color Compression: Enabling this should result in improved performance without noticeable image quality drop by compressing color information and hence allowing more information to fit into Video RAM. This should already be enabled by default in your hardware, even if it's not indicated here.
Export MipMap Cube Maps: Enabling this should provide support for Mipmap textures on Cube Maps. Cube Maps are a trick to show reflections of surroundings on static reflective object surfaces with minimal performance cost, and Mipmaps are a series of pre-scaled textures used to improve rendering performance as an object recedes into the distance. Once again, this should already be on by default, but you can tick it to make sure it's enabled.
Export Signed Vol Textures: I have no idea what this setting does. I assume it allows support for a particular Volumetric Texture type/method.
Line AA Enable: This option refers to Line Antialiasing - antialiasing which only works on lines, not the outlines of shaded or filled objects (e.g. powerlines in a 3D game). Enable this and test in a game to see if thin standalone lines become less jagged at the cost of some performance.
Enable Raster Guardband: This option controls Hardware T&L Guard Band Clipping, which is an optimization technique to improve video performance by only clipping (removing) certain portions of the 3D world, and this in turn saves CPU time. It should be enabled by default, but enable it here anyway. Only disable if you notice a reduction in performance or you see visual glitches.
Allow Macro Volume Textures: I have no idea what this setting does. I assume it allows support for a particular Volumetric Texture type/method.
Force Compressed Stencil Buffer: The Stencil Buffer is shared with the Z Buffer and most often controls effects like shadows in games. Ticking this option forces the stencil buffer data to be compressed, which may improve (or hurt) performance depending on the game; you should experiment to see which works best for you.
Constant Compare Enabled: I have no idea what this setting does.
Support for Non power of two size textures: This option enables support for non-standard texture sizes, and should be enabled.
Support for Displacement Maps: Unlike Bump Maps which are a trick to simulate bumps, scratches and dents in objects, Displacement Maps allow objects to show actual depth characteristics, even when viewed from the side for example. This technique is used in recent games, so support for it should always be enabled.
Adaptive NPatch Support: N-Patch is an ATI-developed technology for making 3D surfaces more realistically curved, and is used by ATI's TruForm technology. However this requires support in games to function properly, and most games do not support TruForm or N-Patch.
Tiling Settings: These settings control support for various texture surface tiling methods. I recommend enabling them all, as they all should be supported by your graphics card and may be used in particular games to improve performance as necessary.
Advanced OGL Tweaks
As mentioned earlier, these tweaks only apply to OpenGL games, such as those based on the Doom/Quake engines.
Force Vertex Cache for Iris: I have no idea what this setting does.
DitherAlpha: If enabled, Alpha Textures - that is textures with transparent areas (like chain link fences) - will be dithered. This means the colors are blended more smoothly and hence should look better. Disabling this may resolve any visual glitches and may improve performance in OpenGL games, but will show more color banding (i.e. more noticeable color gradation).
Disable AGP Blit: Blitting is used primarily for 2D graphics and there should be no reason to disable or alter this option, unless perhaps you're having problems in a 2D game.
Disable FGL AGP: Not clear what this setting does, perhaps it's related to disabling the ATI FireGL graphics card series' AGP function.
Export OpenGL 2.0 Procedures: Should be enabled, as this provides support for OpenGL 2.0 functions. You should only disable this if an OpenGL game or application is not functioning properly.
CCC Mode Switch
Enable Merged 3D Mode (Emulate Control Center): This option is ticked by default to emulate the Catalyst Control Center settings. I recommend you leave this enabled, as most of the descriptions in this guide refer to CCC functions, and the old Control Panel is no longer being updated by ATI to include newer options/settings.
Compatibility Tweaks
These settings are very dangerous, and should only be altered if you know precisely which setting (and why) you want to disable. As the name of this section suggests, you would only want to disable these functions to ensure compatibility with a particular game or application, otherwise they are all best left at default and won't be covered individually here.
Display Tweaks
Once again, these settings are quite dangerous to alter and you must know what you're doing, and have a specific reason in mind, before altering them. The most common reason would be if your connected display is not being correctly detected, however you should try the troubleshooting methods built into main CCC/ATT Displays sections before resorting to altering these.
Multi Thread Support
Enable MT Support: If you have a multi-thread capable CPU, that is either a dual/multi core CPU, or a CPU with HyperThreading (virtual dual core) technology, you can enable this option for a potential performance improvement. You should leave the 'Minimum Working Threads' to 0 to start with, and set the 'Maximum Working Threads' to a value like 2 to start with. Play some recent 3D games and see if you get an actual improvement in performance, and also note if there is any additional instability caused. If it remains stable and you also notice a performance improvement, raise the Maximum value to 4, 6 or 8 for example and again experiment.
New AA and AF Methods
Here you can disable support for Adaptive Antialiasing and/or High Quality Anisotropic Filtering. These are both described further in the CCC section of this guide, and really there should be no reason at all to disable support for these, as you can simply not select them in the main 3D settings if you don't want to use them. I'm not clear what ASBT is.
Video Tweaks
These settings all relate to hardware acceleration support for particular video formats (not 3D games). By default you should have DXVA_WMA (Windows Media Acceleration) enabled. However apparently enabling acceleration for other formats can destabilize your system, so please be wary.
Hotkeys
This section of ATT allows you to assign hotkeys which you can use to quickly access particular ATT functions. This is fairly self-explanatory, and it is up to you whether you wish to enable hotkeys or not, depending on how often you access particular functions in ATT. Hotkeys must be enabled (ticked) here for your hotkeys to work while ATT is running.
Plugins
This section of ATT shows the various Plugins which have loaded into memory along with ATT to enable particular functionality - such as those used in FlashOSD (See below). You can enable, disable or configure these plugins as required.
Display
This section of ATT is essentially the same as the Displays options covered in the CCC section of this guide, and won't be covered in detail here. If you don't have any issues with your display(s) setup you don't need to alter these settings.
Refresh Lock
As discussed at the bottom of page 4, it is recommended that you select the higher refresh rate at your chosen resolution(s) to minimize eye strain. You can do this using the methods mentioned on page 4, or you can use this section of ATT to both create a new custom resolution and/or set a new refresh rate for a specific resolution. Once again note that you must not try to force a higher refresh rate than your monitor can support at your chosen resolution, as this will cause an 'Out of Frequeny' black screen and potential damage to your display.
Rotation
This section of ATT is essentially much the same as the Rotation settings in the CCC - see that section of this guide for appropriate setting descriptions.
Video & Colors
This section of ATT is essentially much the same as the Video and Color settings in the CCC - see that section of this guide for appropriate setting descriptions.
Tools & Options
The General Options for ATT are covered at the start of the previous page. However there are some additional functions here you may find useful:
Dump Video BIOS: If you want to save a copy of your current video card BIOS, select 'Dump Video BIOS' and a BIOS Dump.bin file of your current BIOS will be saved to your chosen location. This can be useful if you're upgrading your video BIOS and want to keep a backup copy of the original version, or if you want to alter the BIOS in a BIOS editor.
Save Desktop Icon Positions: Basically this option allows you to save your current desktop icon positions, and if at any time your icons get moved/messed around (e.g. after a driver update), you can select 'Restore Desktop Icon Positions' to do exactly that. Note that this is not a tweak specific to ATT or ATI graphics cards - I cover how to implement this tweak on any system on page 141 of my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion.
On Screen Display: Another very handy feature of ATT is the ability to show useful information on screen at any time while a game is running, such as your current framerate, or information about your system temperatures. To enable the On Screen Display (OSD) function, under the OSD tab tick the 'Enable OnScreen Display' box. If you don't want the OSD to appear in overlays such as Videos, click the 'Disable OSD in overlays' box. You can then customize where the display text appears and how it behaves. Note that you can enable/disable the OSD for particular games using the Game Profiles (see previous page), and you can also assign hotkeys to OSD functions (See Hotkeys section), so that for example you can toggle the display of the OSD at any time rather than having it on all the time.
FlashOSD: Under the FlashOSD tab, you can set up additional display items for the OSD, such as your GPU speed, System Memory used and Motherboard temps. You can select whether this additional display is brought up automatically at regular intervals by selecting the 'Auto Flash' option; whether it is constantly shown by selecting 'Show All Time'; or whether it is only triggered manually using a hotkey by selecting 'Manual'. I recommend assigning a hotkey to this function and selecting Manual, as the other options can be annoying or can interrupt game performance. Note that for additional information like Motherboard temps, you will need to enable a relevant FlashOSD Plugin and then click the Configure button.
That concludes our look at ATI Tray Tools, which is clearly a very detailed and handy utility, and can serve ATI users quite well in replacing or supplementing the existing Catalyst Control Center. Remember that some of the settings and descriptions may alter slightly with various revisions of ATT. If you find that there are any major settings or functions missing, or indeed inaccuracies in the descriptions above, please Email Me. However please keep in mind that I can't provide tech support. Finally, I recommend that if you find ATI Tray Tools useful, that you consider giving the tool's creator Ray Adams a donation to show your support. You can do this by going to the 'About...' item in ATT's main menu. He is maintaining ATI Tray Tools to the benefit of thousands of users with his own resources, with no help from ATI, so again I think he deserves some support if you find the tool useful.
The next section of this guide covers the basics of video card overclocking.
Overclocking
The modern graphics card is a lot like a small computer by itself. It has a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) which is the graphics equivalent of a Central Processing Unit (CPU), it sits on a motherboard-like Printed Circuit Board (PCB), and has its own Video RAM. And just like a computer system, the components on a video card can be "overclocked" to increase performance. Overclocking a graphics card involves increasing the frequency at which particular video components perform their functions. For more details on basic overclocking theory, read the detailed Overclocking chapter of my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion.
The two components of a video card which can be overclocked are the GPU (also called the Engine or Core), and the Video RAM (also called VRAM or just Memory). You can overclock one or both of these components, with varying results based on a number of factors, but generally resulting in an increase in performance the higher you overclock each component.
To overclock your video card, you'll need a tool which allows you to change the clock speeds of the Core and the VRAM. For Radeon 'XT' or X1000 series graphics cards, you can use the built-in OverDrive functionality (See the ATI Control Panel/Control Center sections for details). This allows safer overclocking, because OverDrive constantly checks to ensure your graphics card is not in any danger of overheating and thus being permanently damaged. However by the same token this can prevent you from reaching higher overclocks. Furthermore, ATI graphics cards which don't have a built-in temperature sensor cannot use OverDrive (it won't appear in your Control Panel/Control Center) and hence will require a third-party overclocking tool. The reliable tools I suggest you use are:
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PowerStrip: You can download this utility from the PowerStrip Website. It is a fully functional free trial version, however you will need to purchase the software to keep using it after 30 days. Once installed and run, PowerStrip sits as a small monitor icon in the System Tray. To access the overclocking functionality, right-click on this system tray icon and select Performance Profiles>Configure. In the Performance Profiles dialog box, you can use the two sliders to adjust your clock speeds, with the left one affecting Engine (Core) clocks, and the right Memory clock speed.
ATI Tray Tools: As covered on the previous pages of this guide, you can download and use the free ATI Tray Tools utility to overclock your ATI graphics card. The latest version of ATI Tray Tools now supports overclocking on X1000 series cards.
Note: If you want to use the ATI Overdrive functionality, you will have to make sure the 'ATI Hotkey Poller' Service is enabaled (See page 4). If you're using a third party overclocking utility like ATI Tool or ATI Tray Tools, you will need to disable the 'ATI Hotkey Poller' Service.
The Warnings
Hold on to your hats, it's time for the warnings to roll out. Whenever the word 'Overclocking' is used, you have to get used to seeing the following facts:
# Overclocking can damage your video card. The way it does this is through excessive heat and stress on the component you are overclocking, and this can effectively kill that component or permanently impair its functionality. It can sometimes happen almost instantly, sometimes after days, sometimes after many months. Overclocking is not risk-free, and damage to components happens more often than you think.
# Overclocking instantly voids the warranty on your graphics card, as does any physical modification to the card. Yes, it can be difficult to prove that you've overclocked the card, but if any damage is done to the card due to overclocking then the place where you bought the card, or the card's manufacturer may discover this and deny you a warranty repair/replacement.
# I take no responsibility for any damage you do to your video card if you choose to overclock it. Sorry, but all I can do is try to provide accurate information. What you choose to do with it is your responsibility.
If overclocking scares you, or you simply cannot afford to replace your video card on the off-chance it gets damaged, it's best to steer clear of it. Everyone these days seems to flippantly recommend that you overclock your components the second you have them installed in your machine, but the truth of the matter is that there is a risk of damage and some people do not want to take such a risk - and that's fair enough.
The Procedure
To overclock your video card, simply increase the clock speed of the Core/Engine, and/or the clock speed of the Memory, both of which are measured in MHz. The Core generates graphics data, and depending on your CPU and the rest of your system specifications, increasing the core speed can result in a small or large performance improvement. The Memory transfers information to/from the Core, and increasing its speed can once again improve performance either slightly or significantly, in conjunction with your Core speed and the speed of the rest of your system.
As a general rule, if you have a fast graphics card and a slow CPU, then overclocking your graphics card yields less performance improvements. If you have a fast CPU and a slower graphics card, then overclocking the graphics card can show greater improvement. The reason for this is that if the graphics card is the 'weak link' or 'bottleneck' in the equation, and a particular game requires more graphical power and speed, then quite clearly overclocking the graphics card can show more of an improvement than in situations where the CPU or the rest of your system is the weak point. For example if you have a new ATI X1800 graphics card and a 1.6Ghz CPU, overclocking the graphics card really won't improve performance dramatically since the CPU is the bottleneck.
The whole overclocking procedure goes something like this:
1. Select a component to overclock (Core or Memory).
2. Increase its clock speed by a small increment, e.g. 5MHz.
3. Run a game or a benchmark for a short period (See Benchmarking & Stress Testing section below), testing to see if you get any crashes/freezes, stuttering, or 'Artifacts' (small graphical anomalies, such as white dots, strange color blocks or flickering textures).
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3, until you experience a problem - this means you've reached the current limit of your overclock for that component.
5. Reduce the clock speed by at least 5MHz to provide safe headroom.
6. Repeat the entire procedure for the other component (Core or Memory).
7. Once you believe you have both a stable and fast overclock, do a much longer run of benchmarking and/or play some games for a longer period of time (e.g. 2 hours), paying particular attention to any small artifacts which may appear, indicating the need to reduce the overclock ever so slightly and/or increase cooling.
That, in a very basic sort of way, is how overclocking is done. It can sometimes provide a very noticeable improvement in performance, but if you have an old or low-end graphics card, then overclocking is not going to improve performance dramatically. Certain low end graphics cards simply do not have hardware support for the functionality demanded by newer games - like Pixel Shaders and Vertex Shaders. If your card does not have hardware support for an advanced function, overclocking cannot surmount this handicap. Still, if done properly and safely, overclocking gives a free performance boost.
Cooling
One of the major factors in obtaining a stable overclock is cooling. As components are taken beyond their original specifications with overclocking, so too are their cooling requirements. Just like a motor vehicle engine requires a radiator system and a fan to draw out the heat from the block and cool things down, so too a graphics card typically has a metal heatsink and fan to first draw out the heat from around the GPU and then blow cool air on the heatsink to help dissipate all that heat into the surrounding air.
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Under normal circumstances, the heatsink and fan combo on your graphics card does its job relatively well. However in a closed case with other components also pumping out heat, the temperatures rise to a point where any overclocking can tip the balance from stable to unstable, particularly in warmer months. As soon as you start experiencing freezes and crashes, and strange blocks or lines of colors appearing on your screen, or even small white dots, then you know that additional cooling is quite likely. Even if you don't overclock the card, when ambient temperatures are very high, you will need to provide additional cooling. To supply plenty of fresh cool air to the graphics card, try doing one or more of the following:
# take the side off your case to allow fresh air to more easily enter it, and for hot air to more easily be removed from inside it. If this alone increases system stability then you know heat is a problem.
# install more case fans which suck cold air in from the bottom front of the case, and blow hot air out the top rear of the case, or the top of the case. If you do this, leave the sides on your case to allow a 'wind tunnel' effect for maximum expulsion of hot air.
# install additional fans which blow directly on the hottest components, including the CPU, graphics card, hard drive and power supply.
# install a heavy duty heatsink and fan on the hottest components, particularly the CPU and video card. You can get speed-variable fans which are more silent during idle times. Don't skimp on quality, buy a top-quality unit (e.g. Thermaltake). These units have superior design and material usage which really makes a difference in heat extraction and cooling. Note once again that unless the hot air is expelled from your case, it will simply build up and defeat any heavy-duty cooling, so don't forget the case fans.
# install 'passive' cooling units such as heatpipes and water cooling solutions, although these are more advanced to install and use.
Remember however that beyond a certain point, no amount of cooling can remove all the heat being generated right near the component. The component will simply hit a wall at which you cannot overclock it any more without doing permanent damage and creating constant system instability and graphical anomalies. Don't push to or beyond this point unless you like to spend money replacing the component.
That covers the basics of overclocking a graphics card. There are more advanced techniques you can undertake to overclock components even further, such as increasing your AGP voltage, volt modding your graphics card, opening up additional pipelines on certain graphics cards, and flashing your card with a modified BIOS. All of these would take a great deal of time and space to describe accurately, and involve a much higher degree of risk and potential damage, so they are beyond the scope of this guide.
The bottom line is that overclocking is not all that hard to do - the trick is in getting a good balance between speed and stability. I urge you to make sure that you err on the side of stability, since a system that crashes, even if it's not often, can be extremely counter-productive to enjoyable gaming. The next section looks at Benchmarking and Stress Testing tools which allow you to test out your tweaks and stabilize your overclock.
The next section looks at benchmarking and stress testing your system for maximum stability.
Benchmarking & Stress Testing
Regardless of whether your graphics card is overclocked or not, you will want to measure its performance. This is particularly relevant if you have made some adjustments or tweaks, and you want to objectively measure whether they improve overall graphics performance or not. Or perhaps you want to compare various graphics driver versions to see which is the fastest on your machine. In any case, the process of coming up with an objective 'score' with which you can compare performance with others and yourself is to benchmark.
Benchmarking tools also serve a dual purpose. Because of their system-intensive nature, they are great for use as stress testers. Running them continuously is a good simulation of running a graphically intense game, and can bring out instabilities and problems very quickly, allowing you to detect and diagnose problems more rapidly, and also to determine whether your overclock is too unstable for daily use.
There are several programs which provide benchmarking functionality and also double as good stress testers. All of the programs below are readily available and completely free to download. Many of these are covered in the Benchmarking & Stress Testing chapter of my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion, which I strongly suggest you download if you haven't already. The more graphics-specific ones are covered below:
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3DMark 2006: You can download 3DMark06 from the: FutureMark Website. This is the mother of all graphics benchmarks, and is the most commonly used one by far. The latest version of 3DMark is a Direct3D based benchmark (utilizing DirectX9.0c features) which runs through a series of basic and advanced tests based on your graphics card's capabilities, and provides a score at the end for comparative purposes. Install 3DMark, start the program and click the 'Run 3DMark' button to start a benchmarking run on the default settings. Record your score at the end of the run, and whenever you tweak or alter your system settings, you can do another run of 3DMark to determine if your Direct3D performance is improving or degrading. You can also compare scores online using the Online Result Browser (ORB). You can access the ORB by clicking the Options button under the Results section on the main 3DMark screen.
You can also install and run earlier versions of 3DMark, such as 3DMark05 or 3DMark03 if you want to see how older games would perform on your system - or simply to see what previous versions looked like. However remember that the scores from the different versions are non-comparable, and that the different versions stress the components of your system in different ways.
Aquamark3: You can download Aquamark3 from MajorGeeks. Aquamark3 is another Direct3D/DirectX9.0-based benchmark that also provides a result at the end of a series of graphical tests. Install Aquamark3 and start it, on the main screen click the 'Select Measurement' button, and on the free version of Aquamark you can only select the 'Start Measurement' under Option 1. At the end of the run, record your score, and you can then compare this with others in the online Aquamark Result Comparator, which is similar to 3DMark's ORB.
CodeCreatures: An older Direct3D/DirectX8.1 benchmark, CodeCreatures can be downloaded from MajorGeeks. It is useful as an indication of performance for slightly older games, and also a good stress tester just like 3DMark and Aquamark3. Install the program and start it, then click the Run button on the left side of the main screen to begin a series of strenuous tests. Record the results you get at the end and keep them handy for future reference.
RthDribl: RthDribl 1.2 (Real Time High Dynamic Range Image-Based Lighting) is actually a DirectX9 tech demo and not a benchmark. It can be downloaded from the RthDribl Website. You must have a graphics card with Pixel Shader 2.0 support to run it, which means a Radeon 9600 or above. It does not have a series of tests to run, so simply start up the program and observe your framerates. You can also change the objects viewed, the materials used on their surfaces, and the backgrounds used. It is an excellent graphics card stress tester.
You may have noticed that all of the above are Direct3D benchmarks. This reflects the popularity and more common usage of this Microsoft standard for developing games. However, there are some OpenGL benchmarks you can use. One of the more popular ones is:
GLExcess: You can download GLExcess 1.2 (also called XSMark) from the GL Excess Website. As with most benchmarks, installing and running the program results in a run through a series of tests, with results provided at the end. You can upload and compare these results online using the XSMark Results Page.
Game Benchmarks
Of course instead of synthetic benchmarks which only simulate intense gaming activity, you can use some actual games to run benchmarks and see how your tweaks and overclocking performs on particular game engines. Note that some of these benchmarks are not as stressful as the more artificial benchmarks above, so they don't necessarily double as stress testers. But their results are more "real world" and hence more indicative of the performance and image quality you will encounter in games. Two of the most recent and indicative benchmarks are below:
Unreal Tournament 2004: The Direct3D-based Unreal game engine is the basis for many games, including Unreal Tournament 2004, America's Army, Raven Shield and Thief 3 to name a few. If you own this game (and have the latest patch), you can run a built-in benchmark which measures your performance in Unreal engine games. Look in your \UT2004\System\ directory for a file named Benchmark.exe, and run it to begin the benchmark. For further details of tweaks you can perform to improve your performance in Unreal Engine games, check out my UT2004 Tweak Guide, my America's Army Tweak Guide, and my Thief 3 Tweak Guide.
Far Cry: A game which uses an advanced engine called the CryEngine, Far Cry does not have an official benchmark built into it. However, you can download a custom-made Far Cry benchmark from HardwareOC. Install the benchmark, start it up and under the various tabs select the resolution, language and level you want to benchmark. You can even choose whether to use Direct3D or OpenGL as the renderer, making this a more modern OpenGL benchmark should you need it. Note that to use the latest version of the benchmark you need the latest Far Cry Patch. For more information on how to tweak Far Cry for maximum performance, see my Far Cry Tweak Guide.
Doom 3/Quake 4: The Doom 3 engine developed by id Software and used for Doom 3 and Quake 4, is a very unique and elegant game engine. It can look fantastic, even on lower end machines. It is a perfect OpenGL benchmarking tool - especially since there are few recent OpenGL benchmarks. To use Doom 3 or Quake 4 as a benchmark, start the game and open the game's console (press CTRL, ALT and ~ keys together). From here you can launch custom demos (pre-recorded game sequences), at the end of which a set of figures showing your average framerate over the length of the demo. To run the built-in Doom 3 demo - and this is recommended if you want to compare your results to others - type "timedemo demo1" (without quotes) in the console. Wait for the run to finish and note the results, then you can compare them with others online. Note, if you want to use any custom cache options you've implemented in Doom 3 (to reduce jerkiness), type "timedemo demo1 1" (without quotes) and Doom 3 will use precaching for the demo, which will be closer to how your regular game performance is.
However Quake 4 does not have a built-in demo. If you want to record your own timedemo, load up a particularly challenging stretch of the game, then open the console and type "recorddemo demoname" (without quotes). E.g: 'recorddemo trialrun' will start recording a demo called trailrun.demo in your \Doom 3\base\demos\ or id Software\Quake 4\q4base\demos directory. Type "stoprecording" (without quotes) to stop recording this demo at any time. To then run this demo as a benchmark, simply type "timedemo trialrun" (without quotes) in the console and it will be played back, and your average framerate over the run will be shown. Again, you can use the "timedemo trailrun 1" option to use precaching on any custom demo as well. Note that the Doom 3 engine is extremely sensitive to overclocking because of the way it is designed, so if you crash, freeze, reboot or artifact during the run keep this in mind. For more details of Doom 3 tips and tweaks to improve performance, check out my Doom 3 Tweak Guide, and for Quake 4 tips and tweaks, check my Quake 4 Tweak Guide.
Half Life 2: Half Life 2 uses a special engine called the Source Engine, developed by Valve Software for this excellent game. The game is based on Direct3D and uses DirectX9.0 features. To use Half Life 2 as a benchmark/system tester, you will need to open the game's console. Note that console access, usage instructions and command variables list - plus much more - is in my Half Life 2 Tweak Guide. Once in the console, type "record demoname" (without quotes). E.g: 'record mydemo' will start recording a demo called mydemo.dem in your \Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\[username]\half-life 2\hl2\ directory. You can now playback this demo by using the command "playdemo demoname" (without quotes). However, to play back the demo as a benchmark, use the timedemo command instead: e.g. "timedemo mydemo" (without quotes) will run the mydemo demo you recorded earlier but this time Half Life 2 will provide benchmarking statistics at the end of the run, including time taken and average FPS for the run.
For comparative purposes, try downloading and using one of the many custom-made Half Life 2 demos available from various tech sites, and compare the results with others who have similar hardware. You can also try using the HardwareOC HL2 Benchmarking Utility. Finally, you can record a demo through a particularly slow and challenging area of Half Life 2, then play it back over and over to see if your system is stable.
Note: The HardwareOC benchmarking utilities use portions of my relevant tweak guides with my explicit permission to do so.
Benchmark Results
Once you've run some benchmarks, it is important that you understand what influences benchmarks and their results. Firstly each benchmark uses a different graphics engine, and stresses a different combination of your system's components in different ways. For example, the RthDribl benchmark/tech demo relies almost solely on your graphics card's power and stresses it in isolation of everything else. On the other hand the UT2004 benchmark uses a combination of CPU and graphics card power to produce good results, and hence if you have a fast graphics card but a slow CPU you will not get as good a result. 3DMark similarly depends to some extent on your CPU's type and speed, and also the level of support your graphics card has for advanced DirectX9.0 features like Pixel Shaders and Vertex Shaders.
There is also the simple fact that other factors can come into play. For example systems with a faster memory subset, that is faster RAM speed, dual channel memory, a HyperThreading-enabled CPU, or a 64-bit CPU may see faster results all else being equal.
In the end however, I recommend running several benchmarks and seeing how your tweaks and changes, and your overclocking stability performs under all of them. You may well get a good, stable, problem-free result in 3DMark, yet get crashes, artifacts and stuttering when running the Unreal engine. This is because not all graphics engines are equal, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses and sensitivities to overclocking and particular settings. Running multiple benchmarks and trying to get good, stable results in all of them is the key to being able to play all your games without a hitch.
If you keep running into problems, follow the advice in this guide, and refer in particular to the next section for guidance: Troubleshooting.
Troubleshooting & Conclusion
You've made it to the end of this guide, but the following information may be some of the most valuable if you are having problems with your machine.
Troubleshooting
Inevitably if you own a PC and you run any games more complex than Tetris or Solitaire, you will run into problems at some point. What separates a PC from a gaming console is that each PC is almost entirely unique in its combination of parts, being composed of various types of hardware and software. A gaming console on the other hand is identical for everyone who owns it - the exact same components are in every PlayStation2 around the country. It is that uniqueness which makes most PCs susceptible to problems, since they each have to be set up correctly based on the types of components used, and taking into account a great many factors. And that's why I write Tweak Guides - to give you the information you need to customize and optimize your settings based on your own particular combination of hardware and software. It's not just a case of telling everyone to turn something on or off. It takes some effort on your part to figure out what's going wrong and what the best settings are.
However, you still have to be aware of the potential source of particular types of graphics-related problems to be able to narrow down your search for the correct advice to resolve it. The information below is by no means a comprehensive listing of problems and solutions, but it does give you a good starting point as to what the major culprits behind your particular problem may be:
Problem: Graphics freeze on the screen, sound keeps looping
Solution:
# See the Cooling tips under the Overclocking section
# Reduce your overclock on the Core
# Disable Fast Writes and/or Write Combining
Problem: Game Quits to Desktop with No Error
Solution:
# Reduce or completely remove any overclocking
# Increase the cooling in your system
# Ease the CAS timings on your RAM (See Adrian Wong's BIOS Guide under the BIOS section)
# Make sure if you use two or more RAM sticks that they are equivalent speed and CAS rating
# Disable Fast Writes
# Test your RAM (See Windows Optimization below)
Problem: System Spontaneously Reboots
Solution:
# Follow the advice under the Before Installing Drivers section above to prevent automatic reboots by Windows
# Ease the CAS timings on your RAM (See Adrian Wong's BIOS Guide under the BIOS section)
# Make sure if you use two or more RAM sticks that they are equivalent speed and CAS rating
# Optimize your Windows Virtual Memory settings (See Windows Optimization below)
# Test your RAM (See Windows Optimization below)
Click to enlarge
Problem: General Protection Faults in Unreal-based Games
Solution: Follow all the tips in this guide to start with. More specifically:
# Reduce or completely remove any overclocking
# Reduce your AGP Aperture Size to 64MB
# Ease the CAS timings on your RAM (See Adrian Wong's BIOS Guide under the BIOS section)
# Make sure if you use two or more RAM sticks that they are equivalent speed and CAS rating
# Optimize your Windows Virtual Memory settings (See Windows Optimization below)
# Disable Fast Writes
# Test your RAM (See Windows Optimization below)
Problem: Windows "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD) Error
Solution:
# Reduce or completely remove any overclocking
# Test your RAM (See Windows Optimization below)
# Disable Fast Writes
# Optimize Windows in general (See Windows Optimization below)
# Follow all the tips in this guide. BSODs can have a multitude of causes, so it's difficult to list all of them. See the Windows Optimization section for a link to my TweakGuides Tweaking Companion which explain various Windows error messages.
Problem: Graphical anomalies, such as flashing textures, blocks or lines of odd colors appearing
Solution:
# Reduce or completely remove any overclocking
# See the Cooling tips under the Overclocking section. Pay particular attention to cooling the Video RAM, or reducing the Memory speed. This is the most common cause
# Disable Fast Writes
# Disable Write Combining
# Reduce the Hardware Acceleration slider by one or more notches
# Make sure you have a "clean install" of the latest drivers, and the AGP drivers installed (See Old Catalyst Removal and Motherboard AGP Drivers section)
# Note: If you experience graphical anomalies during the bootup phase of your PC, or in the BIOS screen, then this is a clear sign of an overheating graphics card, and more likely a graphics card which has had its components permanently damaged by overclocking. There are no Windows drivers or settings involved at bootup, hence any problems which occur then are solely hardware-based.
Problem: Stuttering/Intermittently Freezing Graphics
Solution:
# Optimize your Windows memory settings (See Windows Optimization below)
# Check the resource-reduction tips in the ATI Control Center section above if you're using the ATI Control Center
# Test your RAM (See Windows Optimization below)
# Defragment your hard drive
# Disable Fast Writes
# Tweak specific game settings - See below for a list of available game tweak guides
# Change AGP Aperture Size to 128MB
# Check SmartGart settings (See ATI Control Panel section above)
# Note: Follow all the advice in this guide, and in the Windows Optimization section below, but if you have a low amount of RAM (512MB or less) and/or a slow hard drive and/or a slow CPU/graphics card, you may not be able to avoid a certain amount of graphics stuttering due to loading pauses and components struggling to render the scene.
That is just a sample of the common problems, and common solutions to try when running into graphics-related issues. In general, most of the graphics and gaming problems I've heard of from readers and on various forums are due primarily to one or more of the following factors:
# Overclocking the system too far and/or not providing sufficient cooling. This is by far the most common cause.
# A system with one or more slow/weak components which are not capable of providing optimal performance, and fail regularly under stress.
# Sub-optimal settings in the BIOS, in Windows and in the game itself.
Windows Optimization
To ensure you have the most optimal settings in Windows and your BIOS in general, read the following guide as it is the key to ensuring smooth, stable gaming on any Windows XP-based system:
TweakGuides Tweaking Companion
The totally revised TweakGuides Tweaking Companion is the complete system optimization guide for Windows XP users. It contains an enormous amount of detailed descriptions and resources together in one free 175 page downloadable PDF file. Everything from the correct installation of Windows and critical software and drivers, through to recommendations for every significant setting in XP, all the major performance, visual and convenience tweaks, and descriptions of XP's functionality. The guide contains dozens of links to major free applications for optimizing and maintaining your system, as well as to a vast range of resources for finding out more about your PC and troubleshooting PC problems. Basically the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion is the mother of all Windows XP tweak guides and system optimization guides.
Conclusion
Well, if you've reached this point you have a great deal of patience, but hopefully that patience has been rewarded with some improvements in your system's graphical performance not to mention improved stability. I realize the guide is long, and it might be hard to follow all the advice provided, but I do hope that it serves a useful role in being a central information resource for the optimization of your ATI graphics card.
If you have any feedback to give me on the guide, I would be more than happy to hear from you: Email Me. Bear in mind that I can't provide any Tech Support, and I cannot provide personalized tweaking advice or purchasing advice. This guide has recently been significantly revised, and as such may contain some minor errors or omissions, so again please email me if you see something which doesn't look right for your particular graphics card. ATI has not provided me with any hardware or technical support, and my main system does not run a recent ATI graphics card, so updating this guide has been quite difficult, using a secondary system with a 9800 Pro. Any genuine help the more knowledgeable ATI users out there can give me in keeping this guide updated for newer ATI cards would be greatly appreciated.
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