The Battle of the Betas: Catalyst 12-11 vs. GeForce 310.33 – HD 7970 GHz vs GTX 680 revisited
Benchmarks & Conclusion
Here are our results of twenty-eight benchmarks – twenty-five games and three synthetics – compared between Catalyst 12.11 beta against the latest GeForce beta 310.33 drivers.
“Wins” between the two video cards are in bold; if there is a tie, both results will be in bold type.
We note some serious performance improvements with Catalyst 12-11 beta in more than several games since we tested it last time. Generally the performance increases are across the board and have finally moved the HD 7970 at GHz speeds ahead of the GTX 680 in about a 3:4 ratio in our benchmark suite!* We also find that the newest GeForce driver also brought good performance gains and recommend that you download and upgrade to the very latest drivers no matter which video card you may have!
*(Note: We fixed the bolding typos in our chart and the ratio of GeForce wins to losses is approximately 3:4, not 2:3 as originally stated)
Do not forget to download and install the Catalyst Application Profiles (CAP) if applicable to your PC (they are downloaded in addition to Catalyst 12-11 from the same AMD support page).
To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to either of these latest betas because there are real advantages, and the pluses that we found outweigh the rare few negatives. AMD’s driver team has generally brought ten months of driver improvements all at once to HD 7000 series.
We have to also give our recommendation to the latest GeForce 310.33 beta drivers. In most cases they provide excellent performance increases with no real negatives that we have encountered. We’ll be back to expand this testing to multi-GPU and to more of the Kepler and Tahiti families when the WHQL versions of these drivers are released.
In the mean time, check ABT’s forum for the best tech discussions anywhere. You can expect an evaluation of Cooler Master’s new 1000W Silent Pro Platinum PSU tonight as well as a new (mystery) article tomorrow morning!
Happy gaming!
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I wonder what would the results be on same setup but 1080p…
Much the same. 1920×1200 is only slighty more demanding than 1920×1080.
Max paye 2 –> 42FPS with an expensive Graphical card ? What’s about the 3 ^^
kinda misleading with the 7970 just being overclocked to GE specs. Though the lack of Boost just makes using a non GE a bad idea when comparing the two. Flash the 7970 with a GE bios so you can get turbo boost working. Pretty sure the GE will win in even more game with that.
GHz editions are clocked at 1000MHz with a +50MHz boost. The ABT PowerColor Radeon was overclocked to 1050MHz which would mean in a comparable GHz edition, boost would be working all of the time. If anything, we might have given a slight advantage to the AMD card.
At 2560×1600 you’re expected to have SLi/Crossfire really. That’s 4x the pixels of 1080p