Catalyst 10.7 Performance Analysis
Benchmarks & Conclusion
Here are our results of 21 benchmarks – 20 games and one synthetic – compared between Catalyst 10-7 and 10-6. As an added “bonus”, Vantage scored 19528 with Catalyst 10-7, a slight decrease from 19584 with a single HD 5870.
“Wins” are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type. We are hoping to see improved CrossFire performance scaling with Catalyst 10-7.
Here is the HD 5870 and HD 5870 CrossFire benched with Catalyst 10-7 versus 10-6
We note some slight performance improvement over Catalyst 10-6 with Catalyst 10-7 in some games but very little real change. Batman: Arkham Asylum showed an increase in performance with Catalyst 10-7 and Alien vs. Predator benchmark continues to make small gains. However, we would recommend upgrading to Catalyst 10-7 because there is no real disadvantage and whatever slight pluses we found outweigh any slight negatives and it makes reasonable sense to use the latest WHQL drivers. Of course, if you have a 5870 series Radeon, it would be wise to upgrade just for the features of Catalyst 10-7. We were a little disappointed not to see the promised improvements in CrossFire scaling.
UPDATE 07/30/2010: Beware of Catalyst 10.7 if you play Borderlands! It appears to develop a severe memory leak that can happen after a few minutes of play. However, you might be able to resume playing with Ctrl+Alt+Del
We will be back next month to compare performance of Catalyst 10-8 versus 10-7 and perhaps we can also cover the new GeForce WHQLs when they are (probably) released next month. Happy gaming!
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Thx yet again
You are welcome. I just updated this Performance analysis with a warning:
Beware of Catalyst 10.7 if you play Borderlands! It appears to develop a severe memory leak that can happen after a few minutes of play. However, you might be able to resume playing with Ctrl+Alt+Del
Also watch out if you are playing Bad Company 2. 10.6 and 10.7 both have had horrible issues with performance (frame rates, screen going black, etc.) On my 2×5970@2560×1600 my framerates were worse on 10.7 than 10.6, although the game did look better. Looks like I am back to 10.5. I have been a loyal ATi user for a LONG time and this is the worst bunch of drivers(the 10 series) that have been released in a LONG time. C’mon AMD I want my BC2 to be pretty again!
v[27]v
Don’t blame the drivers for all your issues. Your case is not the majority of gamers. I have not had any issues playing BC2 at all nor any games. The 10.7 drivers have brought some great performance gains in fact for the majority of people. My system two 5850s CF with a GTS250 dedicated PhysX @ 6048×1080 Eyefinity.
@xDee xDee
What do you chalk it up to be then? There are a ton of people out there that have documented these exact issues. The entire rig I am running off of isn’t exactly on the cheap end of hardware. If 10.5 works (although I don’t have the performance increase) and 10.6 and 10.7 have issues with the screen going black I would have to say its the driver.
http://www.google.com/search?q=10.7+catalyst+bad+company+black+screen&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
clean install of 10.7 had my compy restart in just cause 2 after 30 minutes of play… temps were fine, used drivercleaner in safe mode to wipe out 10.5…
…uuggghhh, going back to 10.5
looking forward to buying nvidia next time around.