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How Good are the DNA-Drivers for ATI Cards?

Posted by Cliff on 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?"

6 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. DNA Drivers... by eviltypeguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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/.

  2. Tweaked to run faster....? by failedlogic · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Tweaked to run faster....? by gl4ss · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    2. Re:Tweaked to run faster....? by Dan+Farina · · Score: 2, Insightful

      you need a faster processor. I would be quick to guess that the 9600XT is being nicely bottlenecked by tht ancient CPU.

  3. MOD Parent Up by Noksagt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  4. Optimized for speed AND image quality? by MobyDisk · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?