ATI's Catalyst Control Center

ATI CATALYST Control Center - Color, Video, SMARTGART and VPU Recover Maiking it Look Good while Improving Stability

Along with video performance settings, video image appearance is equally important, and the Catalyst Control Center is equipped for that as well.  The Color section allows for color adjustment specific to the desktop and in Full Screen 3D mode.  The Gamma, Brightness and Contrast can be manipulated for all colors or specific to either Red, Green or Blue channels.  The sample image is also changeable with a simple click and the correction can also be made using the color correction curve.

Under the Video Section, there are a number of options specific to movie playback.  There are several Video Presets (currently not active) as well as overlay options known as VIDEOVISION.  With the overlay settings, the video image can be tweaked for Gamma, Brightness, Contrast, Hue and Saturation.  In future versions of the Catalyst Control Center, ATI intends to implement a brightness option that only applies to the dark areas of the video, preventing the white-wash effect that typically occurs when increasing video brightness.  With dual-monitor configurations, there is also an option to force video to display in Full-Screen mode on the second monitor using "Theater Mode".

SMARTGART is ATI's tool for improving stability by running a series of tests the first time the system boots into Windows.  If there was ever a stability issue, users can manually tell SMARTGART to run its test on the next reboot. For troubleshooting issues, SMARTGART also has the option to manually adjust a number of internal settings such as AGP speed, Fast Write and AGP Read/Write to help narrow down the cause of the problem.  There are also options for PCI Read/Write settings for those running PCI-Express graphics cards.

The last item is the VPU recover tool, which aims to avoid system hangs resulting from a video lock up, preventing the need to restart the computer.  This can also be manually disabled and can prepare an error report to send to ATI in the event of an error.  ATI has made additional behind-the-scenes improvements to VPU Recover, the goal being to improve the chances of recovering from a graphics lockup.