Introduction

With all the hype around the launch of the GeForce 7900 and 7600 cards from nVidia in the past week, it seems that ATI have been a little bit out of the light.

As usual we saw the new set of Catalyst drivers make their way into our inbox just before the first half of the month but being quite busy testing a whole bunch of new graphics cards from nVidia, we did take a little bit longer then we would have liked to test them and publish our article. No hate mail please!

Never fear, our Catalyst performance analyst for March 2006 is here, so let's take a look at what ATI have done this month. We would like to thank everyone for taking the time to comment last month on our monthly articles and we're happy to mention that we'll be including the Radeon X800XL from now on since it was the most requested graphics cards to be added to our benchmarks from our readers.

Let's get started!

Release Notes from ATI

From ATI:

Performance Improvements

As with most Catalyst® releases, performance has increased in various situations.

* 3DMark05: Pixel Shader test runs as much as 1-2% faster, primarily when Anisotropic Filtering is enabled

* Call of Duty 2: Framerates are up 5-10% on the enthusiast-class ATI Radeon® X1800 and ATI Radeon® X1900 products

Nothing too much has been mentioned by ATI in terms of performance changes but let's run our usual suite of benchmarks and see what happens.