Catalyst 13.11 Beta Performance Analysis versus GeForce 331.58
As part of a regular feature for AlienBabelTech and since we are benching for an upcoming VisionTek R9 280X evaluation, we are charting the performance of 30 games with AMD’s latest Beta 13.11 Catalyst driver using a single HD 7970. We will compare HD 7970 single-GPU performance versus the previous Catalyst 13.9 WHQL driver and also versus the latest GeForce 331.58 WHQL drivers using GTX 770/780.
This driver performance evaluation will give a natural comparison between the driver performance improvements for the GTX 770 and GTX 780 versus the HD 7970, and also versus the HD 7970 at GHz Edition speeds. Both sets of drivers were released quite recently. This is an important time for Nvidia and AMD to showcase their best driver improvements as AMD has just released their new flagship, the R9 290X.
We are going to test Catalyst 13.9 WHQL and 13.11 Beta versus GeForce 331.58 WHQL using our current benchmark suite of 30 games plus 4 synthetic benchmarks – FireStrike, Heaven 4.0, 3DMark 11, and Valley. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit, using Intel Core i7-3770K at 4.50GHz, EVGA Z77FTW motherboard and 16GB Kingston “Beast” DD3 at 2133MHz, and the settings and hardware are identical except for the video cards.
The HD 7970 and the GTX 770/780 are tested at higher settings and resolutions generally than we test the midrange cards as noted on the chart. All of our games are tested at two resolutions: 2560×1600 and 1920×1080, and we use DX11/10/10.1 whenever possible with an emphasis on DX11 games.
Let’s get right to the test configuration, the driver release notes and the tests.
