Catalyst 11.10 Performance Analysis – vs. GeForce 285.62
Benchmarks & Conclusion
Here are our results of twenty-five benchmarks – twenty-two games and three synthetics – compared between Catalyst 11.10 and 11.9 as well as against the latest GeForce drivers.
“Wins” between the two Catalyst driver sets are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type. The GTXes are included for performance comparisons and they are benched with their latest WHQL drivers.
For those who must have graphs, here are two really long ones with the same information as the charts above.
We note some performance improvements over Catalyst 11.9 with Catalyst 11-10 in several games. We also note a few broken games with CrossFire. We already noted some performance improvements in Nvidia’s GeForce 285.62 over 280.26 and recommend that you download and upgrade to the very latest drivers no matter which video card you may have!
Do not forget to download and install the Catalyst Application Profiles (CAP) if applicable to your PC (they are downloaded in addition to Catalyst 11.10 from the same AMD support page).
To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to Catalyst 11.10 because there are real advantages, and the pluses that we found outweigh the few negatives. It is also the driver for Battlefield 3 and there is a beta available if you need further fine-tuning. We also feel that although it makes reasonable sense to use the latest WHQL drivers, this driver has added some performance and features worth experiencing. Of course, if you have a HD 5000 series or older Radeon, it would be wise to upgrade just for the new features of Catalyst 11.10.
We have to also give our recommendation to the latest GeForce drivers. In most cases they provide excellent performance increases with no real negatives that we have encountered. We will be back next month to compare performance of Catalyst 11.11 versus 11.10 and perhaps we can also cover the new GeForce WHQLs when they are (possibly) released next month. Next up is a Core i3-2105 evaluation and we are going to continue with Part three of our CrossFire versus SLI scaling series as we overclock our CPUs further with HD 6970-X4 QuadFire!
Happy gaming!
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Could you possibly include single cards from for example the HD4000 and GT200 series in the next test, with a comparison with the latest drivers you tested for those series?
Apart from showing users with those cards if the drivers are worth updating or not, it also gives a good indication about how much AMD/Nvidia strives to improve performance on their older cards
I’ll try. It is a matter of time pressure. The driver test needs to be current to be relevant. We realize that a lot of gamers are using HD 4000 and GTX 200 series.
Thanks for answering!
Would be great if you could manage getting them in there to show us how much later drivers matter for older series, especially since the release notes are very focused on the newer cards right now
I understand that it takes alot of time to make these benchmark comparisons and I’m really thankful that you take your time making them, I appreciate them alot