ATI Catalyst Drivers: 8.11 vs 8.12 Performance Mini-Review
Written by: Leon Hyman
Introduction
With ATI’s latest driver release, Catalyst 8.12, there has come marked improvements in certain titles. This is documented in the ATI Catalyst 8.12 Release Notes and can be found here. This follows on the heels of Nvidia releasing their Big Bang 2 driver (180.43).
This mini-review will explore the performance differences in a few of the titles. The benchmarks that were used are as follows:
- 3DMark 06
- 3DMark Vantage
- Far Cry 2
- Crysis
- Call of Juarez
- PT Boats: Knights of the Sea
Each benchmark was run on a 4870 1GB and also on two 4870 1GB cards in CrossFire configuration. This was done for both the Catalyst 8.11 and Catalyst 8.12 drivers. Now let us take a look at the rest of the test setup.
Looks good !
Could you also add 8.12 Hotfix tests to that ?
Nice work.
I’d better get to running my Catalyst 8.12 benchmarks. I was going to do them this weekend but I started playing Far Cry 2.
Thank you.
Nice idea Karan, however, the Catalyst 8.12 hotfix was released to address a black screen issue with the 4850 cards in CrossFire.
It was not a performance related release.