Battle of the Betas – GF 326.19 vs. Catalyst 13.8 Performance Analysis – 30 games

Benchmarks & Conclusion

Here are our results of thirty-four benchmarks – thirty games and four synthetics – compared between Catalyst 13.8 beta versus the previous 13.6 beta, and also against the latest GeForce beta 326.19 drivers.

“Wins” between the two Catalyst driver sets are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type. The GeForce results are not bolded.

We note some minor performance improvements with Catalyst 13.8 beta in more than a few games although we did not see the improvements in Metro: Last Light that AMD noted. We also note significant increases in the Secret World and with Crysis 2 that had us retest the older drivers again! We also find that the newest GeForce 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!

The only caveat would be if you regularly play Battleforge with a HD 7970 It has been unplayable for several sets of drivers. Also, do not forget to download and install the Catalyst Application Profiles (CAP) if applicable to your PC.

To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to either of these latest betas because there are real advantages, and the pluses that we found outweigh the rare few negatives. AMD’s driver team has primarily focused on frame pacing for the Catalyst 13-8 betas but they are also quite good for single-GPU performance with the AMD flagship HD 7970.

We have to also give our recommendation to the latest GeForce 326.19 beta drivers. In most cases they provide excellent performance increases with no real negatives that we have encountered. We’ll be back to expand this testing to multi-GPU and to more of the Kepler and Tahiti families when the WHQL versions of these drivers are released.

In the meantime, check ABT’s forum for the best tech discussions anywhere. You can expect an evaluation of EVGA’s GTX 770 SC 4GB by tomorrow night. Immediately afterward, we will begin a series evaluating GTX 770 SLI (versus GTX 680 SLI), GTX 770 Tri-SLI, and also GTX 770 2GB versus GTX 770 4GB vRAM comparisons.

Happy gaming!

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