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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?"
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/.
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
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.
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.