The Battle of the Betas – Catalyst 14.4 versus GeForce 337.50

The Results and the Conclusion

Here are the results of 25 benchmarks – 22 games and 4 synthetics – compared between Release Candidate  14.4 versus Catalyst 14.3 beta 3 versus the latest beta GeForce 337.50 drivers.

First up is the Radeon Chart.  “Wins” between the two Catalyst driver sets are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type.

Column one represents the PowerColor R9 290X at stock Uber speeds tested with the older Catalyst 14.3 Beta versus Column Two with the Catalyst 14.4 Release Candidate drivers. Column 3 shows the PowerColor R9 270X at PCS+ Edition speeds with the older beta, compared with the latest Catalyst 14.4 RC beta in Column 4. Columns 5 show the VisionTek R9 280X stock results comparing the older beta to the new Release Candidate driver in Column 6.

We see good improvement in several games, including in Thief nearly across the board.  When we retested with the actual WHQL 14.3 driver using our R9 270X, we found identical results compared with the Release Candidate, except for Tomb Raider which gained an additional 0.5 fps at each tested resolution.  When Nvidia’s WHQL driver is released, we will revisit this comparison.

The Bigger Picture

Now we add the competing GeForce cards into the mix with their latest Beta GeForce 370.50.  We already compared the last two GeForce betas and found some solid performance increases nearly across the board in DX11 games.

Catalyst 14-3 RC vs GeForce 370.50

Now we see only the latest 14.4 RC driver from AMD compared with the latest beta 337.50  driver from Nvidia.

We also note steady increases overall in the past few driver releases from both AMD and Nvidia with some solid performance increases. We also find that the newest GeForce 337.50 driver also brought good performance gains and recommend that you download and upgrade to the very latest drivers no matter which video card you may have!

Conclusion

To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to either of these latest drivers because there are real advantages, and the pluses that we found outweigh the rare few negatives. AMD’s driver team has made some decent improvements for single-GPU performance just as Nvidia has. We also give our recommendation to the latest GeForce 337.50 beta drivers. In most cases they provide performance increases with no negatives that we have encountered.

We’ll be back to expand this testing to multi-GPU and as newer drivers are released. ABT is building our own Frame Analysis Capture Tool (FCAT) and will soon be supplementing frame rates with frame time analysis.

Next up is an evaluation of OWC’s new external BluRay burner with a potential capacity of 100GB per disk!  We also have an upcoming analysis of Kingston’s new “Fury” 1866MHz DDR3 (we picked, White), a 240GB mSATA drive from Kingston and a mSATA enclosure from VisionTek, and SHIELD.

In the meantime, check ABT’s forum for the best tech discussions anywhere.

Happy gaming!