DH zer0point Catalyst 0.54 'Public Preview'

pr0digal jenius

DHzer0point Catalyst 5.4 Public Preview Release

At last a DHzer0point ATI based driver! Some quick thanks are in order here, first Zardon for believing in us and his amazing support. Spike for the installer and his patience, and our beta crew for the many hours they put in getting these drivers ready. Judas and Zardon for the installer splash, Terry for supplying us with cards for testing purposes. And the entire DH community for the support and the kick in the pants to get these out the door!

This is a Public preview of the work we are doing on the DHzer0point ATI drivers, there are bound to be a few bugs we've yet to discover, however, overall we're very happy with the state of our project and wanted the community to be able to get a hold of them as well.

Included in the DHzer0point ATI release are two additional programs, Radclocker publicly available version. This version does not support the newer PCI/e boards so if you have one of those we're sorry however we are working with ChrisW to get an updated release with that support for our next release. Also included in the release is zackensaks Glidewrapper, a utility for using Glide, to play the older games they were meant to be played. Also included are, of course, the DHzer0point Game specific Enhancements for HL2, CSS, FarCry and Doom3.

-=[ Features ]=-
-Overall performance, IQ, and stability tweaks.
-Increased number of resolutions over the standard Catalyst choices
-HDTV Modes enabled
-DiVX, Mpeg2, WMV acceleration enabled
-Displacement Mapping enabled (if supported by hardware)
-Geometric Instancing enabled

-=[ To Do ]=-
-Fix installer so heading reads DHzer0point ATI Driver Setup and ATI's Eula is replaced with the DHZP Eula
-Fix minor installer bugs
-Further HL2 CSS Optimizations
-Support for wider range of resolutions
-Mobility support - MOBILITY BETA TESTERS NEEDED!
-Updated Overclocking utility for PCI/e boards

-=[ Errata ]=-
Fastwrites are on by default unless you have them turned off in your BIOS. These drivers are built around quality, first, last and always; if you're going to bitch about your 3dmarks going down slightly don't bother. That said HL2 and CSS currently take a larger than normal performance hit, most notably on older cards, due to the increased quality in the set. We are working on resolving this issue. However this can be limited in great part simply by turning down AF and or AA one or 2 levels, if you're used to 8x AF try 4x.

Currently, the set uses the old-style CP. Future releases will come in both CP and CCC flavors.




As always, get your copy at www.dhzeropoint.net

Resistor

Thanks for the release... Going to download it now...

CruNcher

-DiVX, Mpeg2, WMV acceleration enabled

could you clarify this a little bit more indepth i mean to my knowledge their is no special Mpeg-2 acceleration build into the Drivers, only DXVA support wich the Decoders can use but this is really no new Feature.
And DivX aka Mpeg-4 acceleration ??? are you sure about that also i mean that would be really big news

pr0digal jenius

we don't write anything new like that, no, we simply enabled features that are there, but disabled in the drivers, such as DXVA and WMV and other such things.

Drew can explain that in more depth when he wakes up, I didn't write that part

Rumble

great news , downloading now .
Today is a test day . I am very curious about these drivers

Poppi

What was manipulated in these drivers to increase image quality? LOD? Optimizations? Tempted to try these with the support behind the developers, however, I enjoy my freedom with ATI Tray Tools and image quality tweaks. Just wanting to know if there are more to these drivers versus what I can already do myself, especially with the 5.5s right around the corner. Thanks.

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pr0digal jenius

enabling and disabling certain optimizations, changing buffers and filtering around, etc.

And as always, you can still use ATi Tray Tools with these if you want, but it has a habit of overwriting some of our tweaks when you change certain things.

EDIT:
Here's a more exact list for you:
WFog
ZFog
TableFog
Various Z Tweaks (compression, clearing, masking, etc)
Tiling
Dither/Alpha Blending
Various AA Tweaks
Various Guard Band Tweaks
Etc, etc

Hope that answers your question

riles9262

Cool stuff zp team. I will be trying these out.

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A beer a day keeps the doctor away.

tas7035

it doesn't install on mobility 9600!What may i do to work it with my card.The image quality is very important for me and i really want these drivers.

Pottsy306

nice drivers,

btw i would be able to help test mobility drivers if you like.

UnIcOrN

Im kinda interested in these.. Allways been a big fan of the Omega Drivers and normal Cat's.. Only what i want to know is did you guys use the old Control Panel or the newer CCC?

Personally i really like the CCC, it isn't that bad and looks kinda stylish

On another note, are you making only 32-Bit drivers or also if you guys get the hang of it start working on 64-Bit drivers?

Would be nice to have some 64-Bit drivers.

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PoopyTheJ

you can sign up to be a beta tester for mobility , LOD, texture optimizations, filtering opts, zbuffer, etc. Also mpeg2 hardware acceleration is specifically enabled in the drivers, Cruncher, the Radeon boards since the 8500 supported this in hardware however it wasn't necesarily enabled, some codecs could use a generic form of DXVA, MPEG2, Divx, WMV are specifically enabled at the hardware level for 9800 boards and above

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PoopyTheJ

32 bit drivers right now, locally on my machine I'm playing with 64 bit drivers however they're not beta yet. Also we used the CP with this release, future releases we're going to be including both, probably not the 5.5's but the 5.6's and later is how it looks right now

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rgreen83

Great work guys! I really like the idea of quality at the sake of a few fps, who really needs that extra 200 3dmarks when you get better quality?

Just one question though, I am sure you guys are not trying to push Omega out and fully still appreciate his work, but why do all the work over again? Maybe could we see a situation where the two teams pull their resources together to get even more work done?

Zardon

Id like to address this if I may and its an important point.

Some of you may remember when Driverheaven first started, we had another driver modder called cyborg, later known as jeff. Some of you may not know or remember that far back. Both coexisted in harmony on this site. They actually released sets together at one stage.

This isnt a competition, this is simply offering the members who come here to this site "offical driverheaven" drivers.

Why? well because variety is good if its high quality and also some people find different sets work better with different variances of hardware. You can be sure if im allowing anyone to use Driverheaven in the name ive made sure I trust these guys.

Driverheaven is still omegadrives offical support forum, but like we did in the past with plutonium sets we are offering our members more variety.

PoopyTheJ

Thank you Z, couldn't have said it better

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MIG-31

I agree with what Z has said to you're reply.

I don't have any favouritism to any driver.. the omegas based on the cat 5.4's gave me quite a few problems,the most serious were my pc suddenly restarted....

But have been using these zeropoint drivers for two days now and these for me has added more stability & performance than the whql 5.4's.

Far cry (with it 's tweak installed) is running very smooth and now with no ghosting (although very slight) on my lcd monitor.

Hl2 (again with the tweak installed) i can now run this in high rez with medium AA & AF enabled for the first time ever.

but i have used omegas in the past and have had no faults from them.....it's just these 5.4's i don't like.

I myself see this as both PJ & Poopythej enjoy tweaking these drivers to give something back to the DH members more than a competition.

These two deserve some praise towards the efforts put into the drivers in their own right.

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rgreen83

Thanks Zardon, I was by no means trying to stir the pot. Just after Omega hinted awile back that he was wearing thin, I got worried. It is great that we will now have two driver sets to chose from, both backed by the great support this site offers!

Thanks for clarifying, thats really all I was looking for and I knew other ppl would wonder the same thing.

pr0digal jenius

I <3 Notepad

Zardon

Its ok brother, I know who you are, ive seen many of your posts and you are a positive member on DH.

I really just wanted to clarify it and make sure no one got the wrong idea about this - This after all is "driverheaven", and I want to be able to offer you guys viable and high quality drivers as well as omegas, also I personally think the zeropoint guys are great modders - none of their sets are "rushed" to be the first out. we have our own private beta testing forums for these sets and they run some thorough internal testing before release. You see the guys with the cool DHzeropoint avatars? they are the internal beta testers. thanks to those guys Drew and John make sure the sets get a good workout before public release.

Anyway, Lets get the guys some feedback on the zeropoint drivers

pr0digal jenius

Indeed...bring on the benchmarks!

I can't fix it if I don't know it broke, and I can't improve it if I don't know where to start.

Blackboost

A lot of hard-work was put into these drivers and I hope that everyone gives them a try. Please be sure to remove the previous set and use drivercleaner in Safe Mode before installing this set. Also its very important that you point out the correct path of where you installed your games in order for the game tweaks to be installed correctly.

REMOVED
Actually, I'm pretty sure mobility cards as a whole won't work, so we'll just have to solve this the hard way in beta tests, blackboost. However, any mobility users who wanna beta test can drop me or Poopy a PM
---PJ

brujeria

x800xl pci card
no install problems at all.

games look great and run great for me so far.
nice driver set.

if you need pci 800xl testers drop me a line, if not using finished set's works for me as well

pr0digal jenius

Glad you like it.

I Think we're set on non-laptop beta testers for the moment, but thanks for the offer.

INSTG8R

Okay I have a bug already in Pacific Fighters(OGL) I would normally use 4xAA and 2XAF(performance) and Quality Textures and Mips also forced 24Bit. just tested those settings and I get No AA at all and I think the AF isnt on either.

Caze

I'm curious to see some benchmarks as well as I want to know how these drivers compare to Omegas both in quality and speed.

-DiVX, Mpeg2, WMV acceleration enabled
-Displacement Mapping enabled (if supported by hardware)
-Geometric Instancing enabled
These are also very interesting but does anyone know if these are enabled in the Omegas drivers?

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...

pr0digal jenius

Are you setting those in game, or in the Control Panel?

INSTG8R

In the CP, as there are no IQ settings in the game per say

pr0digal jenius

Hrmm...ok

I'll look into it. Can't say I've ever played the game though.



Also, for those wanting to see benchies, here's our beta tester Rob Mclelland's 3dMark: http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=8557666

INSTG8R

I will test it in DX as well (tho not the preferred API for it) also mention its a Sapphire 9800Pro(R360 core) flashed to XT