Catalyst 10-2 Performance Analysis featuring Win 7 and 4870 series
As part of a brand new 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 10-2 was just released last week with an impressive feature set that was previewed here. However, we naturally ask ourselves if the performance improvements and features only applies to the new Radeon 5000 series or also to the more popular and established 48X0 series.
We are going to test Catalyst 10.2 against Catalyst 10.1 using our current benchmark suite of 19 games plus three synthetic benchmarks. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit using Core i7 920 at 3.80 GHz, 6 GB DD3, and our video cards are HD 4870 and HD 4870-X2 (standing in for 4870 CrossFire). All of our games are tested at 1920×1200 and 1680×1050 resolutions and with maxed-out in-game settings plus 4xAA/16xAF and we use DX10/10.1 whenever possible.
CrossFireX Profiles is the main feature of the Catalyst 10.2 release which introduces these application profiles in a separate .XML file that are updated by AMD and then downloaded and installed by the user. We tested this for our HD 4870-X2 using Catalyst 10-1, 10-2 and 10-3 beta, but did not find any performance advantage. We will explore this further in next month’s performance analysis and report how CrossFire-X profiles work for the 5000 series of Radeons also.
Let’s get right to the test configuration and the tests.
