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How Good are the DNA-Drivers for ATI Cards?
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?"
... 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.
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/.
Dude, just try 'em. Backup your existing drivers or have a freshly-downloaded set to re-install if the DNA drivers bomb out. Other than that, what have ya got to loose? Don't be scared! Install them bastards.
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. )
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
http://www.omegadrivers.net
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.
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
DNA drivers are merely a repackage of ATI's 4.12 beta drivers with some registry tweaks/modified DLLs. Those 4.12 beta drivers supposedly increase Half-Life 2 performance by a great deal though, so you might want to give them a try.
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.
Will the DNA-drivers softmod my ATi 9500 to a 9700? Do the omega drivers?
Journal
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?
Ooh...some people don't like to be told they don't know English.
"nVIDIA's drivers are probably the best video drivers you'll ever find, and their support for Linux is nearly as good as the Windows."
Except when they break, or your situation doesn't match what they can do. e.g. Issues with Twinview.
There's a reason there's a Linux Nvidia forum on their site.
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 them to put out a better product and we saw a nice healthy jump in hardware numbers instead of those little pathetic bump ups in horse power.
Give me a break, the 6800s only have marginal at best increase over the reigning supreme for a DAMN LONG TIME NOW 9800 Pro.
You are no clue about video cards n00b and should not be posting here.