Catalyst 10.9 Performance Analysis
As part of an ongoing feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor will be comparing the performance of 21 benchmarks with the current monthly Catalyst driver release versus the one from the previous month. Catalyst 10-9 was released last week and we naturally ask ourselves if there are any performance improvements for the Radeon 5000 series in games. Beside testing with a single HD 5870, we are also going to compare HD 5750 performance with the latest Catalyst drivers.
Our last performance analysis of Catalyst 10.8 was published here and we used a stock-clocked AMD Phenom II X4. Now we are using our overclocked Core i7-920 at 3.2 GHz and we used the same settings that we used for our Galaxy GTS 450 SOC review. This time we are not testing with CrossFire but will return to testing with it next month. The percentage of change from upgrading the Catalyst drivers should remain about the same for any capable CPU platform.
We are going to test Catalyst 10.9 against Catalyst 10.8 using our current benchmark suite of 20 games plus one synthetic benchmarks, Heaven 2.0. We also added Metro 2033 official benchmark as it was just released last month. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit using Intel Core i7-920 at 3.20 GHz, 6 GB DD3, and our video cards are a single HD 5870 and a HD 5750. All of our games are tested at 1920×1080, 1680×1050 and 1440×900 resolutions, with 16xAF, and we use DX11/10/10.1 whenever possible.
Let’s get right to the test configuration and the tests.
