This afternoon, I was able to test the beta of ATI's XP Radeon driver. The drivers that come with XP don't have a lot of the features that we expect from ATI such as Direct3D and OpenGL options, TV-Out, and color calibration. These new beta drivers from ATI make up for what we didn't get in XP out of the box.

For the first time under Windows XP, I'm able to turn vertical sync to "off" so that running the timedemo under Quake III Arena will give the numbers of raw performance with no hinderance from waiting for a vertical refresh. Under Windows ME, I was able to get a respectable 110 frames per second. Under Windows XP, I got a whopping 153.4 fps! I was extremely impressed by the performance of the new Radeon drivers, not just from the timedemo numbers, but from real gameplay as well. I picked a random internet game and just went nuts. There wasn't one glitch in the video; everything was rock solid.

Quake III Arena with ATI Beta drivers Pic1, Pic2, Pic3

Unreal Tournament was the other game I decided to try. I was able to go from 62 to 73 frames per second (average) in the Goop timedemo. Gameplay under XP already seemed smooth with the default drivers, and the improvement from the new drivers makes the game more enjoyable. In the short description I wrote up about Unreal Tournament's performance under XP, I said that there were artifacts present when looking at buildings from a large distance, specifically from one end of the playfield to another in Unreal Tournament. These artifacts are still present, but I found that they appeared under Windows ME as well, so my mistake in thinking it was a bug in the original XP ATI drivers. You can see details of the artifacts here.

TV-Out is a feature of the Radeon card that is turned on by default when you install the drivers. When the driver first kicked in, I got a horrendous picture due to improper sizing of the video. A little tweaking fixed it right up. Although the picture on my monitor was fine, TV-Out wasn't perfect. I did get a good picture from my TV, but it had these white horizontal 1-scan-line-high streaks that would appear and disappear quickly at random spots in the picture. Switching back to ME, I turned TV-Out on and the streaks weren't there, meaning that it's either a bug in the driver, or improper settings on my end.

Overall, I was very impressed with the new ATI Radeon drivers. I'm itching to see these drivers in action once they're officially released.

Mike