Catalyst 11.2 vs. 11.1a Performance Analysis
Benchmarks & Conclusion
Here are our results of thirty-two benchmarks – twenty-nine games and three synthetics – compared between Catalyst 11.1a and 11.2. “Wins” are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type.
We note some real performance improvement over Catalyst 11.1a with Catalyst 11.2 in many games with HD 6000 series. This is the second set of improvements involving multiple games that we have noticed in a long time – twice in two months; although admittedly, not as much as last month’s performance increases overall.
We also noted significant performance improvements in AMD’s Image Quality (IQ) which had slipped for a couple of month at the end of last year and it is now back to where they were, but without any performance penalty. We can recommend that you download and upgrade to the very latest drivers no matter which video card you have; HD 5800, 6800 or 6900 series.
We are sorry that we did not have time to post the benches for CrossFire. However, we will have a new article on SLI versus CrossFire published here this week and you will be able to check CrossFire scaling for yourself. Do not forget to download and install the Catalyst Application Profiles if applicable to your PC (they are downloaded in addition to Catalyst 11.2 from the same AMD support page).
To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to Catalyst 11.2 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. Even if you have a HD 5000 series Radeon, it would be wise to upgrade just for the new features of Catalyst 11-2, never mind for a few 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 since last year.
We will be back next month to compare the performance of Catalyst 11.2 versus 11.3 and perhaps we can also cover the new GeForce WHQLs when they are (probably) released next month as the last GeForce drivers brought good performance increases and features to Nvidia’s cards. And stay tuned for an important series on CrossFire vs. SLI; Part One will be up this week. Happy gaming!
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Hi there and thanks again for comparing new vs old ati drivers. do you have the resources to test those drivers on an older HDs as well? i have a 3850 agp and just wondering if there are any performance differences between new and old drivers.
Actually, I do have an HD 2900XT. The issue with testing our oldest cards is a matter of time. It took nearly one week to benchmark this driver with three video cards. I was hoping to also include HD 4870 and CrossFire numbers but I ran out of time.
I am covering CrossFire scaling in my next article which is due this week and I will attempt to add older cards into to the review after that one. You will generally find less performance improvements from new drivers for older cards.