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Graphics Software Entertainment Games Hardware

How Good are the DNA-Drivers for ATI Cards? 67

Posted by Cliff from the worth-the-download dept.
dark_requiem asks: "I've been digging around online to find some way to pump a bit more power out of my Radeon 9800 for Half-Life2, and I ran across DNA-Drivers. According to the developer, these are hacked versions of the official Catalyst drivers, optimized for speed and image quality. I've been trying to find a good review of the performance of these drivers, but haven't found much. Has anyone tried these before? Are they stable? What kind of performance advantage do they offer?"
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How Good are the DNA-Drivers for ATI Cards? More

How Good are the DNA-Drivers for ATI Cards?

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  • ... read "DNA drivers"...
    oh wait, thats what it says.

    Crazy stuff these biologists are doing nowadays. I guess thats why it seems my gfx card has cancer, gotta do some gene therapy on it.

  • DNA Drivers... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eviltypeguy ( 521224 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @10:53AM (#10874439)
    There's no code difference between these drivers and "the real thing". These are just drivers that have had registry tweaks and DLL mix and matching done.

    Read/Search the forums on http://www.driverheaven.net/ or http://www.rage3d.com/ and you'll find people that do comparison benchmarks with those drivers and the Omega drivers http://www.omegacorner.com/.

    • Agree - these are NOT new Drivers (Score:4, Informative)

      by @madeus ( 24818 ) <slashdot_24818@mac.com> on Saturday November 20, 2004 @07:12PM (#10877155)
      I have tried endlessly to explain to fsckwit forum kids that these are not magical new binaries, and won't give performance gains above and beyond what you can get with the ordinary drivers and a small amount of clue.

      There are plenty of tools avalible (including free GPL'd tools) to modify the large array of avalible registry settings through simple point-n-click interfaces. Most of them will tell you what the options do too.

      Of course the normal ATI control panel provide the most useful set of options (balanced with simplicity), but the tragically 1337 kids who install these don't usually understand the options avalaible in the default drivers, because they never RTFM.
      • Actually, I use the omega drivers.

        Not for performance gains with games as much as
        1. Dell drivers are about 2 years out of date.
        2. ATI drivers won't work on mobility chipsets. Either mod the drivers, or just download some modded drivers.

        I've been using the omega drivers for about 1.5 years now. These drivers are less problemmatic than dlink wlan drivers.

        Grump.
        • . ATI drivers won't work on mobility chipsets. Either mod the drivers, or just download some modded drivers.

          Weird, I've just looked and your totally right it seems. They make dowloadable drivers for the mobility chipset for Mac OS X on the PowerBook (of all things) so I'd amazed they don't have them for Windows.

          Not too surprised about about Dell being out of date, and in your situation I'd use something like the omega drivers too, so I guess that's one good use for them.

          One more reason for me to avoid A

  • Get an NVidia (Score:3, Informative)

    by afd8856 ( 700296 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @10:54AM (#10874445) Homepage
    Much better Linux support, less problems in high-end application such as XSI, better OpenGL drivers,much larger user base, better suport from open source application (I've been a "fan" of ATI until I really started to use Nvidia cards. I don't want to go back. )

    • MOD Parent Up (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Noksagt ( 69097 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @11:44AM (#10874649) Homepage
      The post was not a troll and is generally good advice, despite being a bit off the very narrow topic of the question posed in this story.

      The parent correctly pointed out thatATI's drivers are insanely limited--they STILL don't have 64-bit drivers for linux & the beta Win-64 drivers are garbage.

      As another response to the parent implied, ATI has drivers that are simple to install & don't lead to problems if you don't tweak them too much or stray too far from the default install. All of these issue are really related.

      It is for this reason that I suggest not installing the drivers. Yes--they might work. But if you aren't (1)experimental enough to try this yourself or (2)willing to read what you can on these drivers (both what they offer and what problems people have had), I'd say you're setting yourself up for a headache.

      It can work & if it doesn't, you can rollback the drivers. However, it won't get you insanely l33t performance boosts & remain stable. If it did, why wouldn't ATI use them instead? They're not that negligent in writing the drivers: just very narrowly focused.

      --A disgruntled owner of an X800 and a mobility radeon
      • I agree. Troll? That's ridiculous. We (or at least I) don't post responses just for the benefit of one single person, but for all who may share similar interests or problems. I began reading this thread myself to glean useful information, and I found afd8856's post informative and generally on topic.

    • Re:Get an NVidia (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by afd8856 ( 700296 )
      To the moderator who mod me troll: care to give an explain why Ati hasn't provided until now a driver for Linux for my Ati All-in-Wonder Rage 128 Pro that I bought in 2000 and I paid a shit load of money?
      Care to explain why that board, that is supposed to make full resolution video capture, with 4 times above their hardware specs cannot do it? Why their multimedia center software, the only one that can display the tv tuner channels, crashes constantly even with the latest drivers? And their latest windows d
    • I have to agree with the parent; compared to Nvidia, ATi makes poor software. The history of crappy ATi drivers is long and colorful.

      What little gaming I do anymore is in Planetside. Our outfit requires vent and I get to listen to ATi using members moaning about game lockups, over and over, all day long. I log in with my 4600-TI and play all damn day, no crashes.

      Back when it was hard to get stable, free X servers I became a big Matrox fan. Stability is priority #1. When Nvidia started producing good
    • At the time of my last video card purchase ATI was king 9800 pro and Nvidia was crap. Loud, slow, space heater anyone?

      Of course I'm no fanboy of either, I had 3 Nvidia cards before that, and when the next upgrade is due I'll pick the best for the buck again.

      This is what all gamers should do. It keeps both companies on their toes and keeps them from getting greedy and complacent. ATI's rollout of the 9800 and the big mutiny against Nvidia, pulled Nvidia's head out of their collective asses and forced

  • A more commonly used hacked driver (Score:3, Informative)

    by CNERD ( 121095 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @11:04AM (#10874485) Homepage
    http://www.omegadrivers.net [omegadrivers.net]
    • I am using this now and I have not had any problems with displaying video.

      I play on occasion Halo for PC on my computer. I did a test. I ran Halo with the default updated drivers from ATI and the textures looked ok, everything rendered correctly. I installed the OmegaDrivers and everything became clearer, much sharper than the original drivers. These drivers work and I would suggest you try these out. It made a difference to me while playing Halo on my PC.
  • I have a P3 800 with 640 MB RAM and a Radeon 9600 XT. HL2 plays very well at 1024 x 768 and medium details and 2x AA.

    I don't know why everyone needs to play this at 1280 x 1024 @ 8 xAA and uber-high detail -- you still play the same game. Only you've paid a couple grand more than I have to do it.
    • exactly, it's not like the npc's would explain anything more about the story in 8x aa than without aa at all or that you would have more possibilities in getting to the next area with 8x aa than without aa.

    • Some people would rather have better quality. The only game that I tend to play is tetris, but I can understand the mentality involved. What you are saying is basicaly the same thing as asking a movie buff why they want to go see a movie at an IMAX theatre when they could see the same movie on a portable display with monophonic sound.
    • wha wha wha?! i've got a P3/700, with 256, and i think it's a Radeon 8500? Whatever the highest end PCI Radeon was. Q3 doesn't even play at 800x600 let alone anything new. In fact, isn't HL2's minimum requirement for processor in the GHz range? (I haven't looked, I just assumed it would be since it's so new)

      • i've got a P3/700, with 256, and i think it's a Radeon 8500? Whatever the highest end PCI Radeon was. Q3 doesn't even play at 800x600 let alone anything new.

        hmm, maybe you've misconfigured something or bad luck with your particular card, but the requirements of Q3 are even much lower. when i played it, i did so at a 350MHz P2 with 196MB RAM and an ancient matrox G400, and it ran perfectly. the details weren't maxed out of course, but quite okay, same with the resolution. sure, new games won't run on your

        • Heh - I played Q3 on a dual PII with a Voodoo2 (12MB of video RAM) - the lowest spec card that could do genuine 3D acceleration in Linux. Worked well enough to play anything except really big maps.
        • on my p2 350mhz with 128mb ram quake 3 runs perfectly at 800x600 with all maxed out. video is geforce fx 5200 agp with 128mb ram. he really misconfigured something.
        • sure, it runs quite well in 640x480, everything on.. take it up to 800x600, and i have to go to lowest quality everything...

          well i really wanted to try it in windows, after i upgraded the video in that computer.. but the computer now only runs in linux, as there is no windows driver for my scsi card.

          so, i can't really compare windows to linux performance, as i think this may be an indication of the PCI Radeon drivers sucking for Linux.
      • wha wha wha?! i've got a P3/700, with 256, and i think it's a Radeon 8500? Whatever the highest end PCI Radeon was. Q3 doesn't even play at 800x600 let alone anything new. In fact, isn't HL2's minimum requirement for processor in the GHz range? (I haven't looked, I just assumed it would be since it's so new)

        The poster with the 800mhz processor also has 640MB of ram, compared with your 256MB. I think that's the killing factor in your experience.

        Anandtech has an article up featuring the performance of
    • maybe you dont understand this part, but: with better graphics options, the game looks better.
      I knew it would look like crap on the system I had, so I got a system that not only wouldnt make it look like crap, but wouldnt make whatever game I buy six months from now look like crap, either. If you want to waste money by buying new components all the time just to get games to run at all, that's your own fault. I'm a once-every-few-years buyer, though, and the release of Half Life 2 seems like a very good poin
    • you need a faster processor. I would be quick to guess that the 9600XT is being nicely bottlenecked by tht ancient CPU.
  • Is it a Radeon Pro? How much ram? What resolution and quality settings are you using? What's the speed of your CPU? Any idea how many fps you're getting? Have you downloaded any tweak utilities to overclock it?

  • Tested (Score:3, Informative)

    by Phluxed ( 737458 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @11:49AM (#10874678)
    I've tried Stock ATI, Omega and DNA on my 9800Pro @XT Speeds, and my Mobility 9600 Pro. For HL2 with the DNA drivers I can honestly say I did notice a difference. It was enough for me to go from 1280x1024 2xAA 8xAF to 1280x1024 4xAA 16AF and keep a framerate above the 30 barrier. The omega drivers also gave a similar performence boost, but not quite as much.

  • benchmark yourself (Score:2, Informative)

    by Examancer2 ( 606336 )
    Its not that hard to set up your own comparison. System configurations of reviewers will differ from yours so a direct comparison may not be possible. Just load a few benchmarking utils (3DMark, Quake3 timedemo, FPS counter+game of choice) load the catalyst drivers, not the scores, load the cracked drivers, and see if your scores go up. Not that complicated.

  • Optimized for speed AND image quality? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @11:53AM (#10874702) Homepage
    Statements like that sound like marketing-speak. Optimization is a trade-off between size, speed, and quality. I doubt you can get much benefit out of size for a driver. That leaves a trade-off between speed and quality. So which did they pick?
  • I doubt anyone without the source could hack together "more optimised" drivers than the original coders who can talk directly witht the hardware team.
  • Will the DNA-drivers softmod my ATi 9500 to a 9700? Do the omega drivers?
  • I use the Omega hacked drivers on my laptop because the normal Catalyst drivers won't install (you have to go to your OEM to get drivers - and they're usually out of date).

    So far, so good. They have a few nice features, but I wouldn't expect them to perform any better than the ATI drivers.

    Remember, ATI is already searching for every way to improve the performance of their cards. If the DNA people have found such a way, why hasn't ATI incorporated their modifications?
    • I guess you could ask a similar questions such as:

      "why is my SB Live severely limited when using the creative drivers, and only reveals its true potential with the KX project drivers"

      or

      "why were four of my rendering pipelines disabled by default on my 9800se?"

      These days, there seems to be an incentive for companies to limit the quality on certain products in order to justify the existence of "high end" products. The cheapest way to do this is to design one product, and disable half of the features for a

      • Re:Omega Drivers (Score:3, Informative)

        by RzUpAnmsCwrds ( 262647 )
        "why were four of my rendering pipelines disabled by default on my 9800se?"

        Usually because they are defective. I've tried to softmod several 9800SEs and usually end up with severe rendering artifacts. I'd say that only about 15% softmod without any rendering problems.

        Remember, too, that enabling the extra four pipelines increases the power draw. The default heatsink definately can't handle the extra power and will cause stability issues.

        That's why the 4 pipelines are disabled in the 9800SE.

        "why is my SB

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