ATI AYiR 2006
In order to retest all of the ATI fglrx drivers released to the public this year we pulled out a Radeon X800XL 256MB and a copy of Fedora Core 4. No Radeon X1000 series product was used due to the support not arriving until the April release. Likewise, Fedora Core 4 was used due to its older stock compatibility with the earlier ATI driver releases. The other hardware components we had used for today's test is listed below.
| Hardware Components | |
| Processor: | Intel Pentium D 820 (2.80GHz) |
| Motherboard: | Abit AW8-MAX (i955X) |
| Memory: | 2 x 1GB OCZ DDR2-800 |
| Graphics Card: | ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB |
| Hard Drives: | Seagate 160GB SATA2 |
| Optical Drives: | 16x Lite-On DVD-ROM |
| Power Supply: | SilverStone Zeus 750W ST75ZF |
| Software Components | |
| Operating System: | Fedora Core 4 (Stentz) |
| Linux Kernel: | 2.6.14-1.1656_FC4 SMP (i686) |
| GCC: | 4.0.0 |
| Graphics Driver: | ATI fglrx 8.21.07 - 8.32.05 |
| X.Org: | 6.8.2 |
For this article we had retested all display drivers released this year -- 8.21.7, 8.22.5, 8.23.7, 8.24.8, 8.25.18, 8.26.18, 8.27.10, 8.28.8, 8.29.6, 8.30.3, 8.31.5, and 8.32.5. The purpose for retesting all of these drivers is to get a better understanding for the long-term impact that these drivers have had on the performance and what direction they may be heading in for next year. For benchmarking we had used Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Quake 4, and Unreal Tournament 2004. Unreal Tournament 2004 was used in conjunction with UMark Linux Beta 3. On the following pages are our results along with our concluding remarks and forecast for next year.