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.

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.

Test Configuration & Driver Release Notes

• Intel Core i7 920 reference 2.66 GHz and overclocked to 3.8 GHz); Turbo is off.
• Gigabyte EX58-UD3R (Intel X58 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 2.0 specification; CrossFire/SLI 16x+16x).
• 6 GB DDR3 PC 1800 Kingston RAM (3×2 GB, tri-channel at PC 1600 speeds; 2×2 GB supplied by Kingston)
• ATi Radeon HD 5870 PCS+ by PowerColor underclocked to reference clocks, 850/1200 MHz; supplied by AMD
  
• ATi Radeon HD 5870 by Diamond at reference clocks, 850/1200 MHz
• Onboard Realtek Audio
• 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drive
• Thermaltake ToughPowerXT 775 watt power supply and Element G case supplied by Thermaltake
• HP LP 3065 2560×1600 30 inch LCD
  

Test Configuration – Software

• ATi Catalyst 10-6 and 10-7 (WHQL); highest quality mip-mapping set in the driver, Catalyst AI set to “Standard”
• Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium; very latest updates
• DirectX June 2010.
• All games are patched to their latest versions.

• vsync is off in the control panel and is never set in-game.
• 4xAA enabled in all games (unless specified as 8xAA) and “forced” in Catalyst Control Center for UT3; all in-game settings at “maximum” or “ultra” with 16xAF always applied
• All results show average, minimum and maximum frame rates except as noted.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 7, all DX10 titles were run under DX10 render paths; DX11 titles under DX11 render paths and DX9c, etc.
  

The Benchmarks

• Far Cry 2
• Crysis
• F.E.A.R.
• Unreal Tournament 3
• Just Cause 2
  
• World in Conflict
• Call of Juarez
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
  
• Left4Dead
• Lost Planet
• Call of Duty 4
• X3:Terran Conflict
• Enemy Territories: Quake Wars
• Serious Sam Second Encounter HD (2010)
  
• H.A.W.X.
• Battleforge
• Dirt 2
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat
• Resident Evil 5
• Alien versus Predator
  
• Heaven (Unigine) 2.0
  

Lets look at some of the release notes from AMD’s .pdf regarding Catalyst 10-7.

Release Notes for Catalyst 10-7

New Features
This section provides information on new features found in this release of the ATI
Radeon™ Display Driver. These include the following:

• ATI Eyefinity – HydraVision enhancements
• Enhanced Pull-down detection
• ATI CrossFireX™ technology – support for rotated displays
• ATI Radeon GPU acceleration of VLC 1.1.1 Media Player
  ATI Eyefinity – HydraVision enhancements
• Maximizing a window across displays will now take user defined bezel compensation
  into account
• Automatically adjusts window position when dragging and dropping windows to
  ensure title bar visibility
• Proper dialog box placement – dialogs do not cross displays, are not hidden behind
  bezels, and can be designated to be shown on the users “preferred” display
  Enhanced Pull-down detection
• The Pull-down detection algorithm has been enhanced for higher visual quality on
  certain types of video content
• Supported on the ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Series
  ATI CrossFireX™ technology – support for rotated displays

This release of ATI Catalyst™ enables end users running supported ATI CrossFireX™ configurations to rotate their displays (single or ATI Eyefinity display configurations) and still enjoy the performance benefits of ATI CrossFireX™ technology

ATI Radeon GPU acceleration of VLC 1.1.1 Media Player

• Enables GPU acceleration of h.264 video content when using the VLC 1.1.1 Media Player – delivering a better user experience by consuming less system resources
• Supported on the ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 and ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series of products
• Requires VLC version 1.1.1 and later

The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst™ 10.7. Start here to download the drivers or to read more about them:

Performance Improvements

The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst™ 10.7:

Borderlands

• Performance increases 3-5% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 and ATI Radeon™ HD5700 series single card and CrossFire™ configurations when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering is enabled
• Performance increases 3-8% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5970 single card and CrossFire™ configurations when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering is enabled
• Performance increases 2-6% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5600 and ATI Radeon™ HD5500 series single card configurations when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering is enabled
• Performance increases 2-10% on ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 series single card and CrossFire™ configurations when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering is enabled

Resolved Issues for All Windows Operating Systems

This section provides information on resolved issues in this release of the ATI Catalyst™
Software Suite for Windows. These include:

• “Current Setting” indicator will now appear when “Windows desktop” option is selected in “Catalyst™ Control Center – Basic” for specific CV resolutions

Resolved Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System

• This section provides information on resolved issues in this release of the ATI Catalyst™
• Software Suite for Windows 7. These include:
• “Desktop Window Manager has stopped working” error no longer appears after
• driver installation on specific cards
• ATI Stream (CAL) test no longer exits with exception error under CrossFire™ configurations
• Screen no longer turns blank when flashlight is turned on in “The Chronicles of Riddick 2″ with Screen Space Ambient Occlusion enabled
• Running Unigine Heaven 2.1 (OpenGL) with “Tessellation” enabled no longer causes
• system to fail
• Player no longer exits abruptly while changing basic quality settings in Catalyst™ Control Center
• Browser no longer fails after repeated system suspend/resume and video playback pauses while viewing YouTube content

We see a new feature with ATI Radeon GPU acceleration of VLC 1.1.1 Media Player and some nicely resolved issues.  But we don’t see a lot of performance improvement mentioned except in Borderlands which already plays great on a single HD 5870 with settings maxed out and with even forced AA in CCC.  However, we so see that CrossFire should get some nice performance gains from Catalyst 10-7.  So let’s head right for the results of our performance testing of Catalyst 10-7 versus 10-6.

Benchmarks & Conclusion

Here are our results of 21 benchmarks – 20 games and one synthetic – compared between Catalyst 10-7 and 10-6.  As an added “bonus”, Vantage scored 19528 with Catalyst 10-7, a slight decrease from 19584 with a single HD 5870.

“Wins” are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type.  We are hoping to see improved CrossFire performance scaling with Catalyst 10-7.

Here is the HD 5870 and HD 5870 CrossFire benched with Catalyst 10-7 versus 10-6

We note some slight performance improvement over Catalyst 10-6 with Catalyst 10-7 in some games but very little real change. Batman: Arkham Asylum showed an increase in performance with Catalyst 10-7 and Alien vs. Predator benchmark continues to make small gains. However, we would recommend upgrading to Catalyst 10-7 because there is no real disadvantage and whatever slight pluses we found outweigh any slight negatives and it makes reasonable sense to use the latest WHQL drivers. Of course, if you have a 5870 series Radeon, it would be wise to upgrade just for the features of Catalyst 10-7.  We were a little disappointed not to see the promised improvements in CrossFire scaling.

UPDATE 07/30/2010: 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

We will be back next month to compare performance of Catalyst 10-8 versus 10-7 and perhaps we can also cover the new GeForce WHQLs when they are (probably) released next month. Happy gaming!

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