Catalyst 11.1a vs. GeForce 266.58 Performance Analysis
Benchmarks & Conclusion
Here are our results of twenty-five benchmarks – twenty-three games and two synthetics – compared between Catalyst 10-12 and 11-1a.
“Wins” are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type.
We note some real performance improvement over Catalyst 12-10 with Catalyst 11-1a in many games. This is the first set of significant improvements involving many games that we have noticed in a long time. We also noted significant performance improvements in Nvidia’s GeForce 266.58 over 263.09 and recommend that you download and upgrade to the very latest drivers no matter which video card you have!
We are sorry that we did not have time to do the benches for CrossFire nor SLI testing 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 11.1 from the same AMD support page).
To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to Catalyst 11-1a because there are real advantages, and the many pluses that we found outweigh that any slight and very few negatives. We also feel that although it makes reasonable sense to use the latest WHQL drivers, this hotfix has added some real performance and features worth experiencing . Of course, if you have a HD 5000 series Radeon, it would be wise to upgrade just for the new features of Catalyst 11-1, never mind the good performance increases that we found. We also notice that the image quality of the “quality” (and even high quality) setting has improved over the last couple of driver sets.
We have to also give our highest 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 11-1a versus 11-2 and perhaps we can also cover the new GeForce WHQLs when they are (probably) released next month as the new GeForce drivers brought good performance increases and features to Nvidia’s cards. Happy gaming!
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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