Catalyst 11.1a vs. GeForce 266.58 Performance Analysis
Test Configuration & Driver Release Notes
Test Configuration
Test Configuration – Hardware
- Intel Core i7 920 (reference 2.66 GHz and overclocked to 3.8 GHz); Turbo is off.
- Gigabyte EX58-UD3R (Intel X58 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 2.0 specification; CrossFire/SLI 16x+16x).
- 6 GB OCZ DDR3 PC 18000 Kingston RAM (3×2 GB, tri-channel at PC 1600 speeds; 2×2 GB supplied by Kingston)
- ATI Radeon HD 6870 (1GB, reference clocks) supplied by AMD
- ATi Radeon HD 6970 (2GB, reference clocks) supplied by AMD
- Nvidia GTX 580 (1.5 GB, reference clocks), supplied by Nvidia
- Galaxy GTX 460 (1 GB, reference clocks) supplied by Galaxy
- Onboard Realtek Audio
- Two identical 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drives configured and set up identically from drive image; one partition for Nvidia GeForce drivers and one for ATI Catalyst drivers
- Thermaltake ToughPower 775 W power supply unit supplied by Thermaltake
- Thermaltake Element G Case supplied by Thermaltake
- Noctua UD CPU cooler, supplied by Noctua
- Philips DVD SATA writer
- HP LP3065 2560×1600 thirty inch LCD/SOYO 1920×1200 twenty-four inch LCD
Test Configuration – Software
- ATi Catalyst 11.1a (hotfix) drivers for HD 6870 and HD 6970; highest quality mip-mapping set in the driver, Catalyst AI set to “Standard” where available; surface performance optimizations are off
- NVIDIA GeForce WHQL 266.58 for GTX 580 and GTX 460. High Quality
- Windows 7 64-bit; very latest updates
- DirectX July/November 2010
- All games are patched to their latest versions.
- vsync is forced off in the control panel.
- Varying AA enabled as noted in games and “forced” in Catalyst Control Center for UT3 and Batman: Arkham Asylum; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied; 16xAF forced in control panel for Crysis.
- All results show average, minimum and maximum frame rates except as noted.
- Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
- Windows 7 64, all DX9 titles were run under DX9 render paths, DX10 titles were run under DX10 render paths and DX11 titles under DX11 render paths.
The Benchmarks
Please note that we are using the exact same settings that we used for our Galaxy’s GTX 560 Ti GC – Introducing Nvidia’s Titanium Hunter article this week. . The performance changes result solely from upgrading each driver from the previous one.
- Vantage
- F.E.A.R.
- X3:Terran Conflict
- Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
- Call of Duty 4
- Unreal Tournament 3
- Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Grand Theft Auto IV
- Serious Sam, Second Encounter HD (2010)
- Mafia II
- Call of Juarez
- Crysis
- Lost Planet
- Far Cry 2
- Just Cause 2
- H.A.W.X.
- Resident Evil 5
- Alien vs. Predator
- Battleforge
- STALKER, Call of Pripyat
- Dirt 2
- Metro 2033
- Lost Planet 2
- H.A.W.X. 2
- Heaven 2
Lets look at some of the release notes from AMD regarding Catalyst 11-1 and 11-1a as well as GeForce 266.58 before we head to performance testing.
Release Notes Highlights for GeForce 266.58
Always check the .pdf release notes for specific issues and resolved issues.
What follows are release note highlights from Nvidia’s site. You may find them here and it is also where to begin to download the GeForce drivers for your specific system.
This is the first release from the Release 265 family of drivers (versions 265.xx to 269.xx). You can read more about this family of drivers on GeForce.com.
This driver package supports GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500-series desktop GPUs as well as ION desktop GPUs.
New in Release 266.58
GPU Support
- Supports the newly released GeForce GTX 580 and GeForce GTX 570 GPUs.
Performance
- Increases performance for GeForce 400 Series and 500 Series GPUs in several PC games vs. the latest Release 260 drivers. The following are examples of some of the most significant improvements measured on Windows 7. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:
GeForce GTX 580:
- Up to 7% in Battlefield Bad Company 2 (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 12% in Battleforge (SLI 1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF Very High)
- Up to 11% in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (SLI 1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 7% in Dirt 2 (SLI 1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 7% in Far Cry 2 (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 5% in Just Cause 2 (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF Dark Tower)
- Up to 5% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (SLI – 1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 9% in Stone Giant (SLI 1920×1200, DOF on)
- Up to 8% in Unigine Heaven v2.1 (SLI 1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
* Improves performance in Final Fantasy XI on GeForce 400 Series and 500 Series GPUs.
Visual Quality
- Adds ambient occlusion support for one of the most popular games of the year: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. Ambient occlusion improves the quality of lighting, shadows, and depth perception in many parts of the game. Learn more on GeForce.com.
NVIDIA 3D Vision
- With Release 260 and 265 drivers, the installation process for 3D Vision has changed. Please view this knowledgebase article for more information on the changes.
- Adds support for 3DVisionLive.com Beta 2:
- Adds supports for 3D photo sharing and viewing
- Adds new 3D video clips to the website
- Improved scaling quality with video streaming content from 3DVisionLive.com over previous 266.35 Beta driver
- Adds 3D Vision Window Mode support for the following games and applications:
- Games
- Aion
- Crazy Racing Kart Rider
- Crossfire
- Dragon Nest
- EverQuest 2
- Guild Wars 2
- NED
- PopKart
- QQ Dance QQ
- QQ Xian Xia
- Tian Long Ba Bu
- World of Warcraft – Burning Crusade
- World of Warcraft – Wrath of the Lich King
- Xun Xian
- Zhu Xian 2
- Google Earth
- Improvements to 3DVisionLive
- Games
- Adds support for new 3D Vision Desktop LCD monitors: Acer GN245HQ, Acer HN274H, Hannstar HS233, I-O Data 3D231XBR, Lenovo L2363dwA, Planar SA2311W
- Adds support for new 3D Vision projectors: Acer X1261P, Sanyo PDG-DXL2000
- Adds support for new 3D Vision All-in-On PC: ASUS ET2400XVT
- Adds support for new DLP HDTVs: Mitsubishi WD-83838, WD-83738, WD-73838, WD-73837, WD-73738, WD-73638, WD-73C10, WD-65838, WD-65738, WD-65638, WD-65C10, WD-60738, WD-60638, WD-60C10, L75-A91.
Added the following 3D Vision game profiles:
- Arcania: Gothic 4
- Crazy Racing Kart Rider
- Crossfire
- Darksiders
- DC Universe Online
- Dragon Nest
- Front Mission Evolved
- Guild Wars 2
- Hank Haney’s World Golf
- Lineage 2
- Medal of Honor (2010) Multiplayer
- Medal of Honor (2010) Single Player
- NED
- Need for Speed Hot Pursuit
- NVIDIA Demo: Aliens vs. Triangles
- NVIDIA Demo Endless City
- PopKart
- QQ Dance QQ
- QQ Xian Xia Zhuan QQ
- Tian Long Ba Bu
- TRON: Evolution
- Vizerra (fullscreen version)
- World Rally Championship 2010
- Xun Xian
- Update the following 3D Vision game profiles
- Lost Planet 2 – rating is now changed to Fair
- Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2- rating has been changed to 3D Vision Ready
NVIDIA Surround
o Improved performance for 3-way and 4-way SLI configurations
o Updated 3D Vision Surround and NVIDIA Surround game support list. Please visit the 3D Vision Surround web page for a full list of supported games.
NVIDIA SLI
- Adds SLI profiles for the following PC games:
- Alien vs. Triangles Demo
- Endless City Demo
- Lionheart: Kings Crusade
- Moscow Racer: Legends of USSR
- Rift: Planes of Telara
- Shaun White Skateboarding
- Enhances SLI profiles for the following PC games:
- Age of Conan
- Arcania: Gothic 4
- Civilization V – DX11
- Lost Planet
- World Of Warcraft
Other
o Installs HD Audio driver version 1.1.13.1
o Installs PhysX System Software to version 9.10.0514
o Supports playing back Blu-ray 3D discs when connecting your GPU to an HDMI 1.4 3D TV. Playback requires compatible software application from CyberLink, ArcSoft, Roxio, or Corel. For GPU and system requirements, visit the NVIDIA Blu-ray 3D website.
o Supports lossless DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD audio bitstreaming support for compatible Blu-ray movies with GeForce GTX 460, GTS 450, and GT 430 GPUs.
o Supports high definition 24-bit, 96 and 192 KHz multi-channel audio sampling rate support for compatible Blu-ray movies with GeForce 400 and 500 series, GT 240, GT 220 and 210 GPUs.
o Supports the new GPU-accelerated features in Adobe CS5.
o Supports GPU-acceleration for smoother online HD videos with Adobe Flash 10.1. Learn more here.
o Supports the new version of MotionDSP’s video enhancement software, vReveal, which adds support for HD output. NVIDIA customers can download a free version of vReveal that supports up to SD output here.
o Supports DirectCompute with Windows 7 and GeForce 8-series and later GPUs.
o Supports OpenCL 1.0 (Open Computing Language) for all GeForce 8-series and later GPUs.
o Supports OpenGL 3.3 for GeForce 8-series and later GPUs.
o Supports OpenGL 4.1 on GeForce 400 series and later GPUs.
o Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI technology on DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11, and OpenGL, including 3-way SLI, Quad SLI, and SLI support on SLI-certified Intel X58-based motherboards.
o Supports GPU overclocking and temperature monitoring by installing NVIDIA System Tools software.
o Users without US English operating systems can select their language and download the International driver here.
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Release Notes Highlights for Catalyst 11.1 and 11.1a
Lets look at some of the release notes from AMD’s .pdf regarding Catalyst 11-1 and 11-1a.
Release Notes for Catalyst 11.1a
We see great new features with video and some nicely resolved issues. Up until now, we haven’t noted a lot of performance improvement for a few months but this is about to change. If you run CrossFire, make absolutely certain that you download the latest application profiles as it can make a real performance difference. Let’s head right for the release notes before our performance evaluation of Catalyst 10-12 versus 11-1a.
Always start here to download AMD graphics drivers. This month we decided to test with the Hot-Fix 11.1a, not only because it adds substantial performance over the regular 11-1 driver, it also enables AMD’s MLAA feature on the ATI Radeon HD 5800 & HD 5900 series graphics cards. Beginning Catalyst 11.2 AMD will officially add support for MLAA on 5800/5900 series as well. Here are the release notes for WHQL 11-1 Catalyst drivers. Always check the release notes for specific issues and resolved issues.
Now, we are using the 11.1a Hotfix drivers which are specifically for HD 6000 series cards and Windows 7-64-bit. These have the highest performance available to Catalyst drivers currently and may be downloaded from here. The following performance and changes are in addition to Catalyst 11-1 WHQL which are detailed following the 11.1a notes:
AMD Catalyst™ Driver 11.1a Hotfix Features:
- Performance improvements for AMD Radeon™ HD 6900 & AMD Radeon HD 6800 series graphics cards
- AMD Catalyst Control Center – New Tessellation controls
- Gives users control over the tessellation levels used in applications
- AMD Catalyst AI Texture Filtering updates
- The High Quality setting remains unchanged: This setting provides reference quality filtering from AMD hardware
- The Quality setting now matches the High Quality setting in all respects but one: it enables an optimization that limits tri-linear anisotropic filtering to areas surrounding texture mipmap level transitions, while doing bilinear anisotropic filtering elsewhere. This optimization offers a way to adjust filtering performance without visibly affecting image quality
- The Performance setting has also been updated. It now provides a smooth filtering option that is designed to eliminate most shimmering while preserving the detail provided by anisotropic filtering.
Instructions:
Download and install the AMD Catalyst driver hotfix from the following location:
AMD Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix for Windows 7 32-bit / 64-bit Edition
New in Catalyst 11.1
You can find the release notes for WHQL 11-1 here.
Performance highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 11.1 release includes:
- F1 2010:
- Performance increases up to 12% on AMD Radeon HD 6900 and AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.
- Performance increases up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.
- Left 4 Dead 2:
- Performance increases up to 17% on AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series single and Crossfire configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.
- Performance increases up to 8% on AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series single configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.
Resolved Known Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System
This section provides information on resolved known issues in this release of the AMD Catalyst 11.1 software suite for Windows 7. These include:
- Aliens vs. Predator game no longer fails to load with quad Crossfire enabled..
- Text is no longer missing randomly in Nostradamus- The Last Prophecy demo.
- Graphical corruption is no longer seen occasionally in Nostradamus- The Last Prophecy demo.
- The Protoss Pylon Matrix is now rendered correctly in Starcraft 2.
- Task switching in Dirt2 with Vsync enabled no longer causes a dual link monitor to go black.
- System no longer crashes when enabling Crossfire with 2 monitors connected to the primary card and 2 monitors connected to the secondary card.
- List of supported TV resolutions now includes 1080p 24Hz (if supported by the TV display).
- Cyberlink PowerDVD no longer randomly exits when playing a blu-ray title with the “Aero-on” option enabled in the player.
- An error message is no longer intermittently displayed when viewing a slideshow using Windows Live Photo Gallery.
- Windows Media Player no longer displays a black screen when continuously playing several VC1 format files over a 4 hour period.
- “Host Application not responding” error message is no longer randomly displayed when launching the AMD Catalyst™ Control Center.
Let’s head to the charts and see if the promised performance improvements that AMD and Nvidia have made are realistic. And we get to see HD 6970 tested against GTX 580 with the very latest drivers as well as HD 6870 versus GTX 460; next month we will add GTX 560 into our mix as well as SLI and CrossFire results.
When I look closely at Nvidia’s, its obvious nvidia has a good aim set for the driver results. While the overall average is very positive, there are a few cases that show a slight decline. This is typical. What i want to point out is the accuracy of Nvidia’s aim. If you look only at the set backs, a clear pattern emerges. First off the 460 doesnt really have any losses. They’re completely negligible with not a single fps loss. With the gtx 580 individual game results we can see that virtually every loss in fps is met with a 460 gain. There are six cases the 580 takes a step back or has a real loss. The 460 gains out of 5 of them. This was a fine tuning for the 560 launch. I am not criticizing at all, some may not take this the right way. There are great gains to be made for any nvidia user. But you cant get a driver that improves every case or game and trade offs are the norm. In this new driver it appears those trade offs seem to be more favorable to the gf104/gf114. I can say Nvidia strategically aimed their driver from the data you present us. Nvidia has a good driver team that knows well what it is doing.
Now for AMD,
Alls i gots to say is way to go! Its nice to see the fantastic results they achieved across a majority of games. I believe there will be more and more improvements like these as AMD finds better and better ways to utilize their new architectures.
All in all, it is worth it to everyone with any modern card to upgrade, this is some nice data,
thanx apoppin.
Looking forward to the comparison next month on multi-GPU driver scaling efficiency!
I tried the new drivers and most games run considerably better, also, it seems for me that the minimum FPS and some hiccups have been eliminated, gameplay experience seems to be a bit smoother.
Thanks for the effort fellows
Appopin,
The resolution listed for the Unigine engine is backwards. (1920×1200 should be 1680×1050, and vice versa)
Very nice article though.
-Martimus
Thank-you, Martimus
Fixed.
Thanks for putting in the time to test these. Can I ask you how much time it actually takes you to do this? You’re very thorough, which is greatly appreciated
You’re welcome! I am not really sure how long it takes to run all of these benches as I am continually benching.
For this article, I will just “guess” – 4 cards x 32 benches x 2 resolutions x 2 driver sets – probably well over 30 hours of continuous benching. And of course it takes a few hours to create the charts and write the article.
Nicely done!!
I see a very minor typo, you miss labeled the old Catalyst 12-10 instead of 10-12 just under the charts.
I’m very glad to have found this site and will continue to come back as I’m just starting the process of building a new system. My other one is 11+ yrs old..lol.
Oh BTW…I noticed that you have your work cut out for you