It's MuffinMan's first article on Elite Bastards, and it is a good one. :) And before anyone says anything, THAT IS NOT A NIPPLE SHOWING IN HIS SIG PICT! :roll:

what a waste of time....

The Cat 5.3's are out time to redo the test :)

I think not :p

an utter, utter useless piece of junk information

I'm sure things are better now, but my last experience of trying to actually get ATI drivers to work in Linux (about 6 months ago) meant a wasted weekend of pissing around and then still no workiee. So, in answer to your request... no :p

Yup. Agreed.

not to forget that ati does not include monitor driver initialisation and therefor is fully vulnerable to its own high refresh rate bug on some monitors (if you don't know what this is .... right after install and "first" start the driver does set you refresh rate very high ... higher then 160Hz so all you see is nothing ... you can damage your monitor or it will simply display out of range .... the only chance to fix this is to boot into VGA mode and install a monitor driver which can only be done after a restart not directly after the driver installation

No, it's not new information. But hopefully it goes some way to showing that the extra memory needed by the CCC has little effect on overall system performance.

ok yeah, wowee my drivers are better than yours!!!!. my download is only 6mb, go on beat that. anyone wanna go toe to toe with my drivers memory footprint???????????? you sorry bastards

What are you talking about?

This is 1 of those articles that probably seems like a good idea in your mind. A lot of time seems to have gone into it, but honestly, it's just not relevent to anyone. Who cares how long it takes to install Drivers? Who cares about startup times for various stuff? I mean, would anybody seriously reconsider their graphics card choice based on its Drivers taking half a minute longer to install than a competitors?

This is 1 of those articles that probably seems like a good idea in your mind. A lot of time seems to have gone into it, but honestly, it's just not relevent to anyone. Who cares how long it takes to install Drivers? Who cares about startup times for various stuff? I mean, would anybody seriously reconsider their graphics card choice based on its Drivers taking half a minute longer to install than a competitors? Put it like this, would you change your mind over a Speaker system based on how big the volume knobs were? No you wouldn't, because that'd be stupid

I have to agree with the majority, this article is silly, to the point of making me wonder if there is some hidden intentional message the author is trying to make. Also, even though I am not on either side of the fence for both companies, who in their right mind would use the CCC for any kind of test unless the author is trying to twist the result?

The article was designed as a benchmark comparison for the "average user" and not the relatively small percentage of users who hang around forums dissecting each and every driver release and discuss ways of eaking an extra .5% performance from a driver. CCC was designed by ATI to provide a user-friendly front end to their drivers, and was firmly aimed at the joe-average user. Any new ATI card bought today is bundled with CCC as part of the driver install. ATI have also stated that CCC is the future and that the old control panel will (a) receive no further updates (b) allow no access to some current and future driver features and (c) eventually be phased out altogether. In fact, if in my right mind (which I hope I am), it would have made no sense whatsoever to do those tests without CCC. Oh, and the hidden message? Well, I suppose it's that CCC is bloated and a little slow to start. But, more importantly, it was to debunk some of the myths (as seen in forums everywhere for the last 6 months) that it really does have any negative impact on system performance overall.