Yesterday we were pleased to see ATI release Catalyst beta 1 AMD64 drivers for their Radeon line of video cards.  Nvidia had beaten them to the punch, and only Windows drivers are available, but it is progress.  Having tested the 64 bit UT2004 Linux demo with 64 bit Nvidia drivers we decided to see how well 32 bit games performed under the 64 bit OS and drivers.  Armed with my eMachines M6805 laptop with Windows XP and Windows XP 64 loaded we were off.

The eMachines is packed with an Athlon 64 3000+, the VIA K8T800 chipset, 512MB of DDR333 memory, and the Radeon Mobility 9600 which thankfully the drivers support.  The ATI driver version 6.14.0010.6404 is included with the eMachines, and they don't yet offer an update.  Yes you can used modified drivers that will install on a mobile Radeon, but we decided against it.  Unfortunately we found this in the release notes.

• Direct 3D performance issues are noticed when running applications such as; 3DMark2001SE, 3DMark2003, Serious Sam 2, and AquaMark. under XP 64 AMD with an ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9600/9700 series installed
• OpenGL performance issues are noticed when running applications such as; Serious Sam 2, and Quake 3. under XP 64 AMD with an ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9600/9700 series installed

So that is a bit of a bummer, but in the interest of time we decided to press ahead with our tests.

 

We begin with 3DMark 2003 version 340 where we confirm that the Radeon 9600 Mobility with these beta drivers does indeed perform poorly.

 

The Final Fantasy XI benchmark was the next test, and we found that again these drivers don't fair too well.  In high detail mode the 32 bit drivers are roughly 50% faster.  In low detail the performance improvement for 32 bit over 64 is almost 50%.  Perhaps Final Fantasy XI needs to be added to the disclaimer?

 

Now on to Halo 1.04 we find that things have improved quite a bit.  Yes, the 32 bit drivers still take the lead, but the gap has closed considerably.  At 640X480 it appears to be the only resolution with a significant gap.

 

We finish up our testing with Unreal Tournament 2004.  It is not as graphically taxing as Halo, but still it is a good test.  Here we have the assault and onslaught game modes represented.  The performance of the 64 bit again lags as would be predictable.

So here we have initial testing of the 64 bit Windows drivers for ATI's Radeon.  We can't completely conclude on performance till we can test other Radeon models, and games.  We can hypothesis that the current state of the ATI drivers will not allow it to perform on par with 32 bit games under Windows.  With the 64 bit Unreal Tournament Linux demo as the only 64 bit game at our disposal to benchmark we can not test 64 bit performance.  We hope for 64 bit Linux drivers from ATI, and we hope for a 64 bit Windows executable for UT2004.

At any rate it may not be till Windows XP 64 is officially released, and/or a game with an engine optimized for 64 bit that we will be fully able to see the potential AMD64 can have on computer gaming.  Here's hoping that comes sooner than later.