Catalyst 10.9 Performance Analysis
Benchmarks & Conclusion
Here are our results of twenty-two benchmarks – twenty-one games and one synthetic – compared between Catalyst 10-8 and 10-9.
“Wins” are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type.
We note some real performance improvement over Catalyst 10-8 with Catalyst 10-9 in many games. This is the first set of significant improvements involving many games that we have noticed since Catalyst 10.3a. We are sorry that we did not have time to do the benches for CrossFire but will return to it next month. Do not forget to download and install the Catalyst Application Profiles if applicable to your PC (they are downloaded in addition to Catalyst 10.9 from the same AMD support page).
To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to Catalyst 10-9 because there are real advantages, and the many pluses that we found outweigh that any slight and very few negatives. We also feel that it makes reasonable sense to use the latest WHQL drivers. Of course, if you have a HD 5000 series Radeon, it would be wise to upgrade just for the new features of Catalyst 10-9, never mind the good performance increases that we found.
We will be back next month to compare performance of Catalyst 10-10 versus 10-9 and perhaps we can also cover the new GeForce WHQLs when they are (probably) released late on this month as the release candidate GeForce 260s brought many new features to the Nvidia table. Happy gaming!
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