Catalyst 10.7 Performance Analysis
As part of an ongoing feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor will be comparing the performance of 21 benchmarks with the current monthly Catalyst driver release versus the one from the previous month. Catalyst 10-7 was released this week and we naturally ask ourselves if there are any performance improvements for the Radeon 5870 series in games. Beside testing with a single HD 5870, we are also going to compare HD 5870 CrossFire performance with the latest Catalyst drivers as AMD is promising a general 3-5% performance improvement when AA/AF are enabled.
Serious update
We are going to test Catalyst 10.7 against Catalyst 10.6 using our current benchmark suite of 20 games plus one synthetic benchmark, Heaven 2.0. We also added Serious Sam, the Second Encounter HD benchmark as it has been completely updated for 2010 on the Serious 3 engine. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit using Core i7 920 at 3.80 GHz, 6 GB DD3, and our video cards are a pair of HD 5870s. All of our games are tested at 2560×1600, 1920×1200 and 1680×1050 resolutions and with maxed-out in-game settings plus 4xAA or 8xAA/16xAF and we use DX11/10/10.1 whenever possible.
Let’s get right to the test configuration and the tests.
Thx yet again
You are welcome. I just updated this Performance analysis with a warning:
Beware of Catalyst 10.7 if you play Borderlands! It appears to develop a severe memory leak that can happen after a few minutes of play. However, you might be able to resume playing with Ctrl+Alt+Del
Also watch out if you are playing Bad Company 2. 10.6 and 10.7 both have had horrible issues with performance (frame rates, screen going black, etc.) On my 2×5970@2560×1600 my framerates were worse on 10.7 than 10.6, although the game did look better. Looks like I am back to 10.5. I have been a loyal ATi user for a LONG time and this is the worst bunch of drivers(the 10 series) that have been released in a LONG time. C’mon AMD I want my BC2 to be pretty again!
v[27]v
Don’t blame the drivers for all your issues. Your case is not the majority of gamers. I have not had any issues playing BC2 at all nor any games. The 10.7 drivers have brought some great performance gains in fact for the majority of people. My system two 5850s CF with a GTS250 dedicated PhysX @ 6048×1080 Eyefinity.
@xDee xDee
What do you chalk it up to be then? There are a ton of people out there that have documented these exact issues. The entire rig I am running off of isn’t exactly on the cheap end of hardware. If 10.5 works (although I don’t have the performance increase) and 10.6 and 10.7 have issues with the screen going black I would have to say its the driver.
http://www.google.com/search?q=10.7+catalyst+bad+company+black+screen&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
clean install of 10.7 had my compy restart in just cause 2 after 30 minutes of play… temps were fine, used drivercleaner in safe mode to wipe out 10.5…
…uuggghhh, going back to 10.5
looking forward to buying nvidia next time around.