Introduction

We did mention in our regular Catalyst performance analysis earlier in the day that one of the most important additions to the Catalyst 5.11 drivers was the inclusion of the X1800XL and X1800XT. This makes it the first official driver to support ATI's new series of graphics cards and we found from our sample drivers that there was a slight difference in performance in some games, such as Doom 3 and Half Life 2. Have ATI fixed the issues as we eluded they might?

For this reason we will be having a look at how the 5.11 driver compares against the early sample driver that came with our reference sample graphic card and the first official driver to come from ATI.

This will be also the beginning of what will become the X1K Catalyst performance analysis articles and while we had hoped to add the X1300 and X1600XT, this time around we encountered an error while installing them which meant that they are not suited for these cards. It looks like the 5.12 drivers next month will have support for these GPU's and will help grow this monthly addition to TweakTown.

Let's get started and find out what the driver team at ATI has done for the Radeon X1800XT.