Catalyst 11-8 Performance Analysis – vs. 11.5 and GeForce 280.26
Benchmarks & Conclusion
Here are our results of twenty-three benchmarks – twenty games and three synthetics – compared between Catalyst 11.5 and 11.8 as well as against the latest GeForce drivers.
“Wins” are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type.
We note some real performance improvement over Catalyst 11.5 with Catalyst 11-8 in many games. We also noted some performance improvements in Nvidia’s GeForce 280.26 over 275.33 and recommend that you download and upgrade to the very latest drivers no matter which video card you may have!
We are sorry that we did not have time to run the benches for CrossFire nor SLI testing but will return to it next month. Our HD 6990 temporarily failed and began to artifact even on the desktop so we do not include its results nor the GTX 590 that we also tested. The good news is that we found a fix for it and it will be back in action shortly!
Do not forget to download and install the Catalyst Application Profiles if applicable to your PC (they are downloaded in addition to Catalyst 11.8 from the same AMD support page).
To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to Catalyst 11.8 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 driver has added some real performance and features worth experiencing, including overclocking your AMD Black Edition CPU. Of course, if you have a HD 5000 series or older Radeon, it would be wise to upgrade just for the new features of Catalyst 11.8.
We have to also give our 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 11.9 versus 11.8 and perhaps we can also cover the new GeForce WHQLs when they are (possibly) released next month. Happy gaming!
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Thanks for the performance review!