Driving To The Next Level With Terry Makedon of ATI

[MrB]

David Stellmack has interviewed the ever popular Terry Makedon, Senior Driver Product Manager at ATI. There's a mean picture of him in the interview if you want to check him out.

HF – Do consumers seem to favor using one version of the driver over the other? Any idea what the ratio is between users that choose to download one version over the other?

TM – We get about two million downloads of “Catalyst” per month (which includes all the various components of it). Last time I checked, the CCC downloads were about 40% of the total downloads (which includes many products that CCC is not supported on). That number is heavily swinging toward a higher proportion of CCC downloads.

[Dred]

Thats sad news on Open GL. No question the open GL drivers could be improved in the performance area. The old VooDoo 5 had better open GL performace in terms of effeciency.

Sounds like they do not want to do a complete rewrite. Just brute force it with hardware. Why not have both? Tight code plus brute force. Its not like they have not had enough time to do it.

"HF – We continue to hear many journalists, programmers, and enthusiasts say that ATI’s OpenGL drivers do not offer all of the performance that they could. Could you talk a bit about your OpenGL driver development efforts and what is being done to close the performance gap with your competitors?

TM – There is no gap to close. With our latest X1000 series of products and with the latest beta driver posted (which, by the way, will be a full Catalyst driver in November) we are actually ahead of the competition in real gaming scenarios. A few Websites are showing these numbers so far, and I urge HF to do such a review to show these results.

There is also a secondary project going on to re-write certain parts of our OpenGL driver. This is not expected to give big performance boosts, but just generally will improve stability, and clean up the code a bit."

[friskyolive]

The good news is, Dred, is that opengl kicks ass in a few games, beating nvidia; and for CM to suggest that there will not be a big boost in opengl performance (page 5 of 7), but to patch it up and clean up the code..Gotta wonder if this is in line with the 1xxx series card only, be it short term and later for the whole opengl progress..

Your view is very limited, and I must say, questionable..

[bondolo]

I'm hoping that at some point they fix the display problems in CCC when you are using something other than the default system font size. That's my biggest objection to CCC.

A better skin to match the system default look-and-feel would be nice as well. Freaky cool skins may appeal to some but I prefer "normal" looking applications. This also applies for all of the multimedia center applications. The "blue oval" is simply horrible from a human factors design standpoint.

[radE8]

I can understand the letdown from the ogl revelations (for some) in this interview. But unless you're a linux user and/or in that minority of ogl users, what is there to talk about? Granted, I understand that if there are stellar ogl drivers, then that lessens the impact of directx, and thus gives more cred to something like linux. And from that standpoint, I can see why that minority of people would be upset. But that's a chicken and egg problem that no amount of ati driver rewrites can solve. (Better drivers <-> more applications <-> better linux support <-> less directx <-> less microsoft)

[nutcrackr]

40% use CCC after 13 months

[Dassassin]

Originally Posted by nutcrackr

40% use CCC after 13 months

Exactly what I was thinking! I guess we don't have to worry about the Control Panel disappearing any time soon.