Catalyst 10.8 Performance Analysis

As part of an ongoing feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor will be comparing the performance of 22 benchmarks with the current monthly Catalyst driver release versus the one from the previous month. Catalyst 10-8 was released last 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.  Our last performance analysis of 10.7 was published here and we used an overclocked Core i7-920.  This time we are using a stock-clocked AMD Phenom II X4 as our platform for something a little different.  The percentage of change from upgrading the Catalyst drivers should remain about the same for any capable CPU platform.

We are going to test Catalyst 10.8 against Catalyst 10.7 using our current benchmark suite of 20 games plus two synthetic benchmarks, Heaven 2.0 and Vantage. We also added Mafia II demo benchmark as it has been released last month; soon we will use the full game’s benchmark.  Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit using Phenom II 955 X4 at 3.20 GHz, 4 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.