ATI Catalyst Tweak Guide
Author: Koroush Ghazi
Last Modified: June 2009
Printable Version: Printing Guides
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 many years ago, it is now at least as good as the competing Nvidia Forceware drivers. These days Nvidia and ATI graphics cards are waging a constant battle for supremacy, with particular models from each company coming up as the best performing card at various times. As you'd expect, the Catalysts are also constantly evolving to keep up with this hardware battle. Given these changes, the many new and existing options with confusing names, as well as additional hidden options possible for configuring the graphics drivers, this guide exists to help you make sense of it all.
The guide is more than just about how to perform a few tweaks with the Catalysts. Whether you use the official Catalysts or a modified driver, this guide will help you out. It covers the entire driver installation, setup 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 Nvidia graphics cards.
Note that 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.
Important: This guide does not contain details on all the features in the latest Catalysts as I do not have recent ATI hardware to test all these features. Therefore significant portions of this guide may be outdated or incorrect until I am able to rectify this at some point in the future.
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