Catalyst 11.5 Performance Analysis

Performance charts & Conclusion

Here are our results of thirty benchmarks – twenty-seven games and three synthetics – compared between Catalyst 11.4 and 11.5.  “Wins” are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type.

Conclusion

We note a few performance improvements over Catalyst 11.4 with Catalyst 11.5 in a few games with the HD 6000 series. The performance trades back and forth and most of it is incremental – either way..

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 next week with Catalyst 11.5 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 11.5 from the same AMD support page).  And this is important – if you are affected by the flashing “mouse cursor bug”, you want to try Catalyst 11.5a hotfix!

To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to Catalyst 11.5 because there are new features, and the pluses that we found outweigh that any slight and very few negatives.  Even if you have an older series Radeon, it would be wise to upgrade just for the new features of Catalyst 11-5 and we will resume testing with that popular series next month.

We will be back next month to compare the performance of Catalyst 11.6 versus WHQL Catalyst 11.5.. Perhaps we can also cover the new GeForce WHQLs when they are (probably) released this month as the new 275 GeForce drivers which will bring good DX11 performance increases and new automatic updating of profile features to Nvidia’s cards. Happy gaming!

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