Catalyst AI Peculiarities
After some additional testing, we found that the culprit for the second problem we descibred above (stuttering on the Radeon X1950 Pro) was actually Catalyst AI. As you may know, Catalyst AI enables some performance enhancing application specific optimizations. From past experiences, not all application profiles offer a performance increase in our benchmarks. If you look back at our Crossfire article (which you can read here), we found the embedded profile for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was actually producing slightly lower performance. This again seems to be the case with the stuttering / choppiness problems we're having today with F.E.A.R and Serious Sam II.So, we reran the test both with Catalyst AI set to standard (the default setting) and disabled. You can see the results below. In case you're wondering, the settings and resolution are chosen because they prove to be the crossover point between graphics and system limitations. This means with we can still see some gain with a higher clocked processor without hitting the limits of the graphics cards.
| Catalyst AI Disabled | Catalyst AI Standard | Catalyst AI Advanced | |
| Call of Duty - 1600 x 1200 | |||
| Min | 126 | 137 | 141 |
| Avg | 253.448 | 275.286 | 279.026 |
| Max | 525 | 642 | 552 |
| Homeworld 2 - 1600 x 1200 | |||
| Min | 164 | 165 | 159 |
| Avg | 382.762 | 387.768 | 387.181 |
| Max | 675 | 679 | 679 |
| SW: KOTOR - 1024 x 768 | |||
| Min | 49 | 36 | 44 |
| Avg | 98.284 | 85.646 | 89.560 |
| Max | 121 | 110 | 110 |
| Richard Burns Rally - 1024 x 768 | |||
| Min | 183 | 184 | 184 |
| Avg | 277.039 | 276.854 | 277.085 |
| Max | 387 | 393 | 393 |
| F.E.A.R - 1024 x 768 | |||
| Min | 46 | 48 | 41 |
| Avg | 103.032 | 117.813 | 116.495 |
| Max | 243 | 289 | 289 |
| Quake 4 - 1024 x 768 | |||
| Min | 83 | 97 | 96 |
| Avg | 144.825 | 164.524 | 165.405 |
| Max | 227 | 234 | 238 |
| Serious Sam II - 1024 x 768 | |||
| Min | 74 | 72 | 60 |
| Avg | 89.924 | 90.523 | 87.291 |
| Max | 114 | 117 | 114 |
| Oblivion - Tree Test - 1024 x 768 | |||
| Min | 39 | 39 | 39 |
| Avg | 44.852 | 44.292 | 44.305 |
| Max | 56 | 54 | 54 |
| GTR 2 - 1024 x 768 | |||
| Min | 61 | 61 | 60 |
| Avg | 154.420 | 154.644 | 153.821 |
| Max | 260 | 261 | 261 |
| NFS: Carbon - 1024 x 768 | |||
| Min | 43 | 43 | 40 |
| Avg | 56.253 | 56.141 | 55.081 |
| Max | 70 | 75 | 74 |
We can all see that the embedded profile for SW: KOTOR still offer slightly lower performance. Other notable differences between the settings, particularly between disabling and enabling Catalyst AI are Call of Duty, F.E.A.R and Quake 4. You can also see the differences for these games between 'Standard" and "Advanced" are minimal and not significant. What's significant is that running F.E.A.R and Serious Sam II with Catalyst AI set to "Standard" fixed all or most of the stuttering problems. For the rest of the article, we will be setting Catalyst AI to "Advanced", mostly to keep consistency if we were to benchmark any Crossfire configurations later on. Since performance differences are minimal, the results taken should not be any different if we were to set Catalyst AI to "Standard".
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