Introduction

If you own an ATI Radeon graphics card, chances are you would have heard of the Omega drivers.

While most people choose to use the official ATI Catalyst drivers, the Omega drivers were developed for users who are a bit more adventurous and are looking to squeeze the best performance out of their graphics cards. The Omega drivers were developed by Angel "Omegadriver" Trinidad as a hobby. You can visit his website and the official home of the Omega drivers here.

What makes the Omega drivers so special? Well, aside from the fact that they tweak the registry and various other settings to optimize performance, Angel "Omegadrive" Trinidad is also a member of ATI's Catalyst beta driver testing team. This means he is able to incorporate future Catalyst optimizations into his own drivers! This effectively gives Omega driver users access to future Catalyst benefits, even before the official release!

The latest version of the Radeon Omega driver is 2.5.90. It utilizes ATI's 8.07 Beta driver, which will be released as next month's official Catalyst drivers. It is stated on the website, and vouched for by many users, that the Omega drivers make a big difference for Radeons with 256MB of memory. However, my Radeon has only 128MB so I will not be able to experience these improvements.

Omega drivers are also available for NVIDIA GeForce graphics chipsets, but the Radeon drivers are the ones that get the most attention. I do not currently own any NVIDIA graphics cards, so I will only be covering the Radeon Omega drivers.

So, do these Omega drivers really make a difference? Let's find out!