ATI Catalyst

[BlindMelon7]

What does it actually do?!?!?! All I can see it doing is eating a little bit of ram! Games still run fine with it closed.

Also it has many 3D settings, but I am not sure what these are for, do they add extra AA and force a game to use higher quality settings? Or do they just set the defaults for the game settings?

Thank you for clearing up my tiny mind

[LeeP]

The control centre allows for changing the settings of the GPU itself, multiple monitor output, overclock settings etc. One of the benefits of any GPU software is that you can set all the 3D options such as Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering so that you change the settings once, then you needn't change any settings in your actual game other than the resolution.

Can save a lot of time and hassle and certainly helps the benchmark results if you overclock the crap out of it

However it's not 'necessary' - but if you don't have it configured and running, you need to set up each individual game and if you're anything like me with 25+ games installed, it's a blag to set each one up!!!

[this_is_gav]

You can install only the drivers and get rid of CCC if you like and use a 3rd party product such as ATI Tray Tools to control settings, but it's a bit of a faff on Vista x64, and in a system with 2GB or more, what's 10mb of RAM? ATI TT would have to use some too...

[BlindMelon7]

Ah! Thanks for clearing me up!

I've never had much luck overclocking my card.