This in turn will limit what games they can run since the newer games take a bit more power, especially with AA enabled, AS filtering, and HDR, so now-once again in my opinion-the article is most helpful to the person running old games on an old card. So I personaly don't think how the drivers perform on the old 9700pro make much difference to anyone but a person running the old 9700pro. ATI could have better driver releases in the future, put more resources into it, hire more talented programers, also the hardware is always changing, like dual core CPUs and ring bus memory architectures on graphics cards. I'm not saying the author made the following assumtion, but it would be a logical fallacy for a person to assume the future will happen like the past. It is my attempt at humor and way of saying that I think this article, being more of a research piece into the history of driver support on an older card, is more academic and not very pragmatic.

semiconductorslave - Wednesday, Decemlink So your saying we can't use sarcasim to voice our opinions? I totally appreciate this site and all of the reviews, and hope the editors can handle a little bit of facetiousness every now and then.

ATI did not make any driver changes that significantly impacted either IQ or performance. Although the nature of how we benchmarked and screenshot WC3 means that it's never exactly the same twice, there is no appreciable difference in IQ between the first and the last drivers, or anything in between.Įven more than with UT2004, Warcraft 3 is a no-story. Like with UT2004, there's not much of a story here with image quality.

Though, we are curious about the overall lower frame rates compared to the high mark of 58.9fps with the 3.06 drivers.Ĭatalyst 5.11 versus 3.00 (mouse over to see 3.00) Turning on these features causes a little more variance in results, but even here, there is ultimately no significant change in performance in the end.

With only a marginal blip with the 3.04 drivers, you could practically set a watch to the 9700 Pro's performance on WC3 without AA/AF.

Because WC3 does not have a benchmarking mode, all frame rates are approximate using a custom replay and FRAPS.

As we have mentioned in the past, even for its superb image quality, WC3 is not a terribly performance-intensive game, so we aren't expecting any surprises here. Leaving the realm of FPS's for a bit, we take a look at Blizzard's massively popular RTS Warcraft 3, and its expansion pack, The Frozen Throne.

Warcraft iii frozen throne google