Catalyst 10-3 Performance Analysis

Introduction

In continuing what we started with the Catalyst 10-2 Performance Analysis, today we look at what has taken place since then. Since the Catalyst 10.2 driver was released, we have seen both the Catalyst 10.3a preview driver and the Catalyst 10-3 WHQL driver.

For this article, I aim to use 15 benchmarks consisting of 12 games and 3 synthetic benchmarks to show the performance differences among these 3 driver iterations. The testing will span across the Radeon HD 4000 series (represented by the HD 4870 1GB) and the Radeon HD 5000 series (represented by the HD 5830).

Both 3DMark benches are run at their default settings while all the games, with the addition of the Heaven 2.0 benchmark, are run at 1920×1200 and 1680×1050 resolutions with maxed out in-game settings plus 4xAA and 16xAF.

Let’s get to the test bench and the results.