Catalyst 11.5 Performance Analysis

As part of an ongoing feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor is comparing the performance of 30 benchmarks with the current 11.5 monthly Catalyst driver release versus the one from the previous month.

This driver performance evaluation will give us a natural comparison between the performance improvements for HD 6900 and HD 6800 series. Catalyst 11.5 was released at the beginning of this month and we naturally ask ourselves if there are any performance improvements for the new Radeon 6000 series in games. Beside testing with a single HD 6970 as last time, we are also going to compare HD 6870 performance with the latest Catalyst drivers.

The last performance analysis of Catalyst 11.4 beta vs. 11.3 vs. 11.2 was published here. We are currently evaluating the WHQL Catalyst 11.5 drivers.  We are using our overclocked Core i7-920 at 3.8 GHz and we use the same settings that we used for our Introducing AMD’s HD 6790 article. This time we are not testing with CrossFire as a follow up to this evaluation (Part 2, featuring CrossFire vs. SLI) using WHQL 11.5 will be published here later on this month. The percentage of change from upgrading the drivers should remain about the same for any capable CPU platform.

We are going to test Catalyst 11.5 against Catalyst 11.4 using our current benchmark suite of 27 games plus three synthetic benchmarks, Heaven 2.0, 3DMark11 and Vantage. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit using Intel Core i7-920 at 3.80 GHz, 6 GB DD3, and our video cards are a single HD 6870 and a HD 6970 to represent the Radeons. All of our games are tested at two of these three resolutions: 2560×1600, 1920×1200, 1680×1050, with 16xAF, and we use DX11/10/10.1 whenever possible.

Let’s get right to the test configuration, the driver’s release notes and the tests.