ATI Catalyst™ Control Center FAQ

The initial release of the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center and accompanying SDK will be available in early September, in conjunction with the Catalyst 4.8 driver and will be supported on the R3XX, R4XX class of products. A future release of the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center will add support for the entire Radeon class of products later this year.

As long as the control panel and the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center are both installed, just un-install the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center and reboot your system to get the old ATI control panel back.

The Microsoft .NET Framework provides a highly productive, standards-based, enterprise-ready, multi-language environment that simplifies application development, and facilitates integration with existing software. The .NET framework gives programmers the freedom to write applications using a number of different programming languages, allowing customers to very easily develop extensions or services for the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center.

ATI is actively investigating supporting the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center on Linux and Mac platforms. There are some technical challenges that we are addressing to accelerate this process.

No. The memory that is occupied by the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center will be released when other applications require more memory.

The ATI Catalyst™ Control Center requires Microsoft’s .NET version 1.1 as well as the Catalyst 4.8 (or later) driver.

The initial release of the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center requires a DirectX 9 class graphics accelerator – this includes the Radeon 9500 and above plus the new Radeon X Series of products. We also recommend a mid-to-high end Intel or AMD CPU, with 512 MB of RAM.

The ATI Catalyst™ Control Center is a new product and will be enhanced and improved upon with each new ATI Catalyst™ release. Future releases of the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center will include a number of new features, improve performance, and fix issues that end-users may be experiencing.

The architecture of the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center is based on the client-server model, and uses the Microsoft® .NET framework as its foundation.
The ATI Catalyst™ Control Center run-time (which could include 3rd party plug-ins), acts as the server component and provides the interface between the display driver and the client component, also known as the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center user-interface (which could be ATI only, 3rd party only, or a combination of both). This extremely flexible architecture requires the run-time and server components of the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center to communicate with one another via network messages. It is very important to note that all ATI Catalyst™ Control Center communications that use the .NET channels are “localhost” only, which means there is absolutely no connection to outside non-local systems. Unfortunately users may see warnings from various firewalls, as most firewall software is unable to differentiate between “localhost” and “outside” connections.

The 3D preview is an OpenGL application that uses a number of textures and shaders and requires approximately 20 MB of RAM while it is running – as soon as the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center is closed the preview stops running, and releases the occupied RAM.

ATI used Stardock’s skinstudio application, found at www.skinstudio.net to design the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center skins. A free version of skinstudio can be found at the website.

Yes, the software development kit is available for download from ati.com.

Yes, in the coming months we will be rolling out some contests and promotions in the user community to encourage development of new extensions for Catalyst Control Center. More details will be available in the next month or so.