Catalyst 10.8 Performance Analysis
Benchmarks & Conclusion
Here are our results of twenty-one benchmarks – twenty games and two synthetics – compared between Catalyst 10-8 and 10-7. As an added “bonus”, Vantage is back.
“Wins” are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type.
We note some slight performance improvement over Catalyst 10-7 with Catalyst 10-8 in some games but very little real change. Far Cry 2 didn’t show us a consistent increase in performance with Catalyst 10-8 and the Left4Dead engine was updated by Steam so we will have to get a new timedemo for it as our old one is now outdated.
To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to Catalyst 10-8 because there is no real disadvantage and whatever slight pluses that 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 new features of Catalyst 10-8. We are continuing to be a little disappointed not to see the promised improvements in CrossFire scaling.
We will be back next month to compare performance of Catalyst 10-9 versus 10-8 and perhaps we can also cover the new GeForce WHQLs when they are (probably) released late on this month. Happy gaming!
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