- When you start the process of creating the new drivers, where are you heading for? Is there a primary focus on the specific things (game compatibility/ performance, application compatibility/performance, performance boost, etc)? For example, what are you looking to achieve with next driver edition? Are the goals different for different generations of the cards?

Catalyst drivers are extremely complex, and planning what each release will have in it is a very long process. Typically, there are three teams that work on the driver code. They are:

1) New Features – this team introduces new features for example Eyefinity or Avivo color controls,

2) Performance – this team focuses on optimizations of 3D games and applications,

3) Bug fixing – this team simply fixes bugs.

The ideal Catalyst release in my mind would have all three teams involved and if you notice, the marketing message of Catalyst the theme is Innovation, Performance and Stability. Sometimes we get all three sometimes we don’t, but the bottom line is whenever we have new features, or new bug fixes or performance improvements, we bring them to market as soon as possible. This is why it’s so great that ATI users have the option of updating their drivers each and every month – as a PC user I wish all my components had such great regular updates.

- Where do you get the most information from which you conclude what do you need to correct in the new version of the drivers? Are these your support forums, press feedback, developer demands, random events, or you are consulting an oracle?

Even though I am Greek, I left the oracle back in Delphi where she belongs ;-)  The order in which things get fixed is based on a formula that gives a value from 1-100. There are many inputs into that formula such as who is the customer, how widespread is the issue, does it cause the system to crash, which product, which operating system, etc.

So, it’s very scientific and precise process which determines in which order things get fixed. Our primary source of input of bugs is customer support (email and phone), our OEM’s and our own internal QA. Support forums are very difficult to follow to be honest because there is usually too much noise in them. “Game zzz crashes for me” will then lead to “you suck” to “works for me idiot, check your power supply”... blah blah blah ;-)

- How do you determine the right time to release new drivers? Do you plan in advance the launch date or is the date set in accordance to progress toward the new version and the market requirements?

It’s sort of easy decision, because we know we will release a new Catalyst every month. So, right now I just finished picking the arbitrary date for every month next year. This date is usually somewhere in the middle of the month, with some adjustments for holidays or weekends. Then as we get closer to the month we fine-tune it – maybe one more bug we need to fix, maybe a new game is coming out that we would like to get our optimizations out for, maybe a new feature that ties into new monitors or something. So every month we re-evaluate the exact date, but it’s safe to say it is usually normalized around the middle of each month.

- When do you stop developing drivers for the older cards? Are newer driver versions that still support older models, but are actually the same as previous ones, meaning that you stopped improving them?

We stop developing when we see that sales have slowed down a lot AND we feel that the code is very stable, and that there are no more bugs being reported on those products. Right now, our older products (pre R600) get quarterly Catalyst updates while the newer products get monthly updates. There are simply not that many bugs to fix anymore and all the optimizations have been squeezed out of the cards.

- How do you explain great performance boost with GPU-s and new versions of Catalyst drivers (for example: the 4000 series with Catalyst 9.9 had better performance in games like: Call of Duty 4 up to 25%, UT3 up to 15%, World in Conflict up to 13% and so on)? Could this be done earlier, or were you waiting for the right moment to use hardware to its limits?

We never wait for the “right time”. As soon as our optimization Engineers find a good optimization, we get it tested in QA and we run it through the benchmark lab. If it comes out good and safe, then viola, it is found in the next Catalyst version.

- We have to ask this one:
ATI Catalyst™ 9.9 Display Driver
Version 9.9
Date Posted 09/09/2009
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/previous/Pages/radeonaiw_xp.aspx

Is this a coincidence or you were trying to achieve this intentionally? Also, release dates for previous versions are “nicely” picked.

It was a total coincidence and about 2 weeks before the posting someone pointed it out to me, I thought that was a freaky coincidence, so if you see Catalyst 10.10 now posting on October 10th, it may not be so much of a coincidence ;-)

Hey thanks for the time to talk to us, I hope your readers enjoy using Catalyst as much as I enjoy working on it. Also, if your readers would like real time and exclusive updates please pass on my twitter info to them: www.twitter.com/catalystmaker .