XPS 16: Performance Test of Mobility Radeon HD 4670 drivers

In the interest of maximum (safe) performance, I will test both generic ATI drivers and official Dell drivers with real-world benchmarks (probably mostly video games).

I will test Dell's official ATI driver, the generic ATI 10.4 driver, and any beta driver available from ATI's website. I will not be testing third party drivers.

ATI recommends that Dell laptop users use the Dell drivers.
Dell recommends that Dell laptop users use the Dell drivers.
Which is actually better? We're going to find out.

The test should take place within a week. Right now I need to find a few games that can produce consistent results (i.e. number of fps when watching a pre-recorded demo). Any ideas or requests for games to use? (free game demos, please)

I will be testing Resident Evil 5 benchmark demo, set in fixed mode, DX10, default settings. It gives an average fps reading.

I might also test Quake Live (I think it has a good timedemo test, need to find out) and Starcraft II beta if I can find a way to average its fps reading (does FRAPS do this?).

When I find 3 total tests that I can perform, I will begin testing.

UPDATE: thank you to gaah for performing the driver comparison test.

Test Results: The Dell driver's performance is equal to the performance of ATI 10.4 driver. The Dell driver offers additional features such as the HDMI/DP Audio driver and AVIVO.

Actual test results: http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...ity-radeon-hd-4670-drivers-2.html#post6287018

 

What about PC Mark or something similar?

 

When I last cared about performance tweaking/benchmarking, I learned that drivers are often optimized to work better with programs like PC Mark/FutureMark, than they do in "real" programs. Not sure if this is still the case....

 

It looks like the free version of PC Mark only has the overall test anyway. I'd rather not run that several times on my laptop.

 

I might join in this, I would benchmark Quake Live, Aliens vs Predator, DiRT 2, Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Sega Rally Revo, and Sonic All-Stars Racing... at least this is what I have on Steam, I have a bunch of other games on disc but they are mostly older. I also have Fraps ...

 

Yeah this is a debate that needs to be settled....

I'm thinking dell's driver's will be the better of the two since they are optimized for the studio configuration...alot of people here think that there's no real optimization..

cant wait to find out...when will you be getting around to this?

 

Also, a summary of basic performance would be good, for example noting any stuttering or texture glitches... just general stuff which would be good to know about.

Also, people have been muttering about the dell drivers providing ectra features, if you see anything new in CCC then that would be nice to know about too, also please tell us if the screen looks any different with each driver.

I'm on the stock ATI driver side of things, the dell ones haven't even been updated this year.

 

I will only be testing the Dell ones from 4/5/2010, fairly recent.

I think I will have at least a 3 video game test comparing 2 drivers (1 Dell, 1 generic ATI) by sometime Thursday.

 

Counter-strike (CS:S) has some kind of "time demo" that reports average FPS.

 

I will perform the following benchmarks with CATALYST 10.4 (8.723.0.0000), and Dell's most recent Mobility release (8.721.0.0000) by the end of the day...

DiRT 2 benchmark mode
Quake Live timedemo
Half Life 2 Lost Coast benchmark
3DMark06
3DMark Vantage

 

Dell ("Dell") ATI Mobility Radeon HD driver version 8.721.0.0000 released 5/9/2010 -

versus

ATI ("ATI") generic Mobility Radeon HD driver version 8.723.0.0000 released 4/28/2010 ("CATALYST 10.4")

Tests were done twice, once with the default "balanced" quality settings (BAL), and again with custom high quality settings forced in CCC (HQ)- the custom settings I used were:

8x Antialiasing with Standard "Box" Filter
Adaptive Antialiasing in "Quality" mode enabled
16x Anisotropic Filtering
All other default settings.

System configuration:
Dell Studio XPS 1645
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Intel Core i7 820QM
8GB DDR3 1333MHz dual-channel memory
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670
130-watt power adapter
1920x1080 RGBLED LCD screen
Self-applied Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Paste to CPU and GPU for more effective cooling
Dell System BIOS Version A09 without special hacks or ThrottleStop

First up is Quake Live running in IE8 32-bit ActiveX plugin -
Config: 1920x1080 32-bit fullscreen using "Ultra Quality" graphics preset
\timedemo 1

Results for "ativsdell" custom benchmark recording/demo with 14532 frames using default graphics quality "BAL":
Dell- rendering completed in 116.9 seconds averaging 125.4 FPS
ATI- rendering completed in 116.9 seconds averaging 124.3 FPS
and "HQ":
Dell- 145.6 seconds and 99.8 FPS
ATI- 145.6 seconds and 99.8 FPS

Results for "yaku_bench1" custom benchmark recording/demo with 1111 frames using default graphics quality "BAL":
Dell- rendering completed in 8.5 seconds averaging 130.3 FPS
ATI- rendering completed in 8.5 seconds averaging 131.3 FPS
and "HQ" graphics:
Dell- 10.8 seconds and 103.2 FPS
ATI- 10.8 seconds and 103.2 FPS

DiRT 2 -
Config: 1920x1080 32-bit fullscreen using "Ultra Quality" preset (everything set to highest), accept for the games built-in antialiasing which is disabled/0x

Results for "London Battarsea Air" built-in benchmark using default balanced graphics quality:
Dell- Total frames: 2,686 // Average FPS: 30.4 // Minimum FPS: 25.6
ATI- Total frames: 2,635 // Average FPS: 30.0 // Minimum FPS: 25.7
and "HQ" graphics:
Dell- 2,461 // 28.8 // 23.7
ATI- 2,473 // 28.5 // 23.8

Half-Life 2 Lost Coast -
Config: 1920x1080 32-bit fullscreen using high model/texture/shader/shadow, reflect all, color correction, full HDR, and Trilinear filtering

Results for "Video Stress Test" built-in benchmark using default balanced graphics quality:
Dell- 137.03 FPS
ATI- 137.54 FPS
and "HQ" graphics:
Dell- 73.84
ATI- 73.73

and finally, 3DMark06 1.2 Basic Edition 1280x1024 and all defaults using default balanced graphics quality:
Dell- 7135 3DMarks
ATI- 7145 3DMarks
and "HQ" graphics:
Dell- 6771 3DMarks
ATI- 6770 3DMarks

Summary: performance is pretty much the same, but at least Dell's are packaged with the HDMI driver and AVIVO package, and contains Dell specific customizations.

 

"Summary: performance is pretty much the same, but at least Dell's are packaged with the HDMI driver and AVIVO package, and contains Dell specific customizations."

omm.. wrong. ATI driver contains HDMI driver and AVIVO too, and Dell driver does not contain any dell specific customization.
the performance tests are the results we expected: pretty much the same, ati's a bit better. rather try to play some L5.1 video with DXVA with both drivers, that would be more interesting.

 

Thanks for the above, looks like it doesn't matter what we use as long as someone can keep hunting down the latest Dell ATI driver. I am still curious what you meant with the Dell specific customizations? I wonder if someone did a file compare only with the driver, would it be exactly the same.

HDMI driver and AVIVO packages are of course important and if everyone's findings will show what you found, I might start using Dell now-on.

 

the performance is usually generally the same as both drivers are pretty new, not half year old usually dell drivers are. usually you could only notice big performance difference if you would try a very new game which is newer than the old driver and the new driver was optimized for it, but that's a pretty rare case. basically, there are no dell specific customization worth mentioning at all, so i don't know what he was talking about, i think neither knows him.
yeah, HDMI driver and AVIVO are pretty important. that's why they're in ALL ATI drivers since years, just like the last one. i don't know what he was talking about here either:

 

Please keep your confirmation bias out of my threads. The numbers speak for themselves: it's too close to call one "better" than the other. If you really insist that there is a winner, than the DELL DRIVER won by an average of 0.29% on each test (didn't include the minimum framerate test, but it won't affect the "winner.")

 

i said pretty much the same, you have some real issues understanding my sentences. at first look it seemed ati's driver being better in more tests, but nobody really cares who's the "winner" if the difference is clearly below 1%. nobody, but you. and don't even be embarrassed just because it turned out, that the magic dell-optimization you were talking about was also a lie. you were wrong in everything you ever said to me.

 

None of those things are included in ATI's release, notice nothing is being updated and "is already installed and up to date" from previous installations.

 

wrong. it's already installed cause i actually already installed it. did you thing about that?
+i'm sure as hell i never installed any graphic driver from dell, so how are they already installed if i only installed ati's drivers? pff.. don't even bother to answer. you're all wrong all along in just everything. when do you plan to give up? your next argument will be like 1+1=3. then i'll prove that it's actually 2. then it will start over and over again. i won't play this game, i'm absolutely sick of your bullsh*ts already.

 

Calm down, Francis. You are acting like they killed your first born child. I know notebook video card drivers are important and all, but you can bring it down a notch. Lets not forget we're all here to help each other. Besides, you don't want to give yourself an aneurysm

gaah: Thanks for the unbiased benchmarks. I'm definitely surprised! As previously noted, ATI releases drivers more often than Dell so if you are a gamer you probably want to watch their website rather than Dell. I think most would agree Dell would rather have rock solid drivers on their site than cutting edge ones that could contain bugs. One driver bug across thousands of machines could result in hundreds, or even thousands, of calls to their Call Centers. I'm sure they would rather err on the side of caution.

 

if you read the another topic where it all started, you will understand my frustration. i was there to help people when these ignorant newbie members who had clearly no any idea about what they were talking about arrived and started to flame and troll around, misguiding people. all the time it went to the conclusion that they were all wrong all along in pretty much just everything but they just kept is going, and still keep it going as you can see. i thought this was a professional forum (i'm here since a year and so far there was no problem) and i was here to help. if that's what i get for helping people and not letting fools to misguide others, i won't come here and help to anyone anymore. just do it your way, install the worst, oldest, crappiest drivers ever like they say. you won't be able to play half of the videos with dxva acceleration, and will have bugs fixed long time ago by ati, but it's cool, cause you will have dell's cool optimized drivers, lol. i don't care. ignorant newbies ftw. good bye.

 

I will not be performing any test (at least until 10.5 is released) since I had only 1 different test to perform, and gaah's results are pretty conclusive.

Test Results: The Dell driver's performance is equal to the performance of ATI 10.4 driver. The Dell driver offers additional features such as the HDMI/DP Audio driver and AVIVO.

 

The ATI Mobility driver doesnt contain HDMI and AVIVO driver. You should see by checking ATI Install Manager. First completely uninstall ATI Install Manager and Do Driver Sweeper. Then Start the installation from both Dell driver and Ati Mobilty Catalyst driver. Dell one will have additional HDMI and AVIVO. On the other hand you will have to download the desktop version of ATI Catalyst 10.4 to install HDMI, Hydravision, Avivo. The worst part is Hydravision and Avivo doesnt even work from the generic driver. Try yourself and calm down, you are just too frustrated.

 

well, then it's something they must have changed since the first official (10.3) mobility driver, because before that they contained everything for sure since many years. but even if it's so, it's not the dell version which has extra features, it's the official mobility version which has been just got rid of some components. i suppose there must be a workaround to install these components from desktop version anyway, but even if there's not one, installing the one from dell is not a good choice, cause the official ati's newer and supports for instance gpu-accelerated playback of basically all hd videos. not to mention dell won't update it monthly like ati does, more like half-yearly/yearly.

 

Good luck on the workaround. Please keep us informed when you discover it.

Can you provide an example HD format that the ATI driver can decode/playback with gpu acceleration that the Dell one cannot? The Dell driver allows gpu-acceleration of every format that I have used. Please note that I am not denying your claim, but rather I am trying to find a single reason why anyone could justify using the ATI 10.4 version over Dell's feature-rich version.

 

Lets just stop the argument now and install the latest 10.5 from **ATi Catalyst 10.5 Driver Official Release** . See y'all there...

 

I lol'd. When I finished lol'ing I downloaded and installed 10.5

 

i don't know where this "nice-guy" you came from suddenly, but i guess we can speak more lucidly this way

for the "workaround", see: this. it's not really a workaround, it's officially supported, there's an individual Avivo Package and HydraVision Package to download, as well as catalyst 10.5, it has been just released

here's an example L5.1 video: Big & Free - Download area
but first you have to set some programs up in order to use dxva-acceleration, see this site for howto.
i'm not sure if the dell driver supports it or not cause i didn't try it, but 10.3 didn't support it and 10.4 was the first official catalyst from ati to support it. as i saw, dell's driver version is between 10.3 and 10.4 so i don't know if it already has this feature or not.

 

Do I want/need Avivo if I already have video playback codecs installed (CCCP)?

 

< /flame war>?

 

Lets stay on topic and avoid bickering. Posts have been deleted.

If you believe the results are incorrect, do some tests of your own and PM the OP/and or make a new thread. What will not be tolerated is rudeness or insults.

Any further off-topic posts or insults will be deleted.