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September 24, 2004
The next version of ATI's Catalyst drivers will know what you're playing
With the release of the Catalyst 4.10 drivers, ATI has added a feature called Catalyst AI. Catalyst AI, among other things, enables application detection and optimization. This means that the drivers will handle games differently to try and optimize performance.
As an example, with the release of DOOM III some clever folks figured out a way to significantly improve performance on ATI cards by tweaking some shader settings. What ATI is saying, is that they will take the initiative to figure out these optimizations and do them automatically.
This raises some interesting questions, as the types of things they are doing could cause problems when a) new game patches are released, b) new mods are created for a game that might conflict with these optimizations, etc. Of course this feature can be disabled, but it does present some interesting questions.
nVidia got into some trouble the last time they tried to do something like this.
Posted by jb at September 24, 2004 08:29 AM
