The War of the WHQLs: Catalyst 13.1 vs. GeForce 310.90 – HD 7970 GHz vs GTX 680 revisited
Benchmarks & Conclusion
Here are our results of thirty benchmarks – twenty-seven games and three synthetics – compared between Catalyst 13.1 against the latest GeForce 310.90 drivers and also with the last set of beta drivers for each video card. Please note that results are consistent across 2560×1600 but we did not test the latest drivers again at 1920×1200 and those results are in italics and are not to be compared directly to our results for the new drivers at 1920×1080; however, the GTX 680 may be directly compared with the HD 7970 GHz in all categories.
(Chart typo fixed for tSW – 1920×1080 instead of 1920×1200)
Civilization V got some noticeable performance improvements with both cards as it now has “GPU Decode” .
We also noted some serious performance improvements with AMD’s “Never Settle” Catalyst 12-11 beta in more than several games since we tested it last time. Evidently these increases were rolled up into the latest Catalyst 13.1 WHQL driver which keep the HD 7970 at GHz speeds ahead of the GTX 680 in more than a 3:4 ratio in our benchmark suite! However, we also find that the latest 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!
Testing Frame rate latencies – “smoothness”
We are just going to look at one example from our latest frame time measurement series, Hitman: Absolution.
Lets’s look at the frame time chart for the GTX 680 using the last beta drivers, GeForce 310.70. It has a relatively smooth delivery of frames as confirmed by the chart below:
Here is the frame time chart using the latest drivers, 310.90, very little has changed other than the SSD we are using.
The next chart really does convey the jitter experienced when playing Hitman: Absolution or running the benchmark even though the HD 7970 is faster than the GTX 680. Now the frame time chart for the HD 7970 at GHz edition speeds using the “Never Settle” beta drivers:
Now here is the HD 7970 GHz at the same settings with the latest WHQL Catalyst 13.1; only the SSD has changed but the spikes and the jitter remain:
Since the ranking basically remains unchanged, here is the GTX 680 ranking using the beta driver as in our last evaluation:
Finally the HD 7970 at GHz Edition speeds ranking with the beta driver.
- Average time: Average time across the entire run
- 1% time: Time it takes to draw 99% of frames
- 0.1%: Time it takes to draw 99.9% of frames
As evidenced by the frame times charts, there is noticeable difference in smoothness experienced by the gamer between playing Hitman: Absolution on a GTX 680 versus playing it on a HD 7970. The benchmark may be more demanding than the game, but the jitter is still more evident on the Radeon than it is on the GeForce. Even though the HD 7970 is faster in raw framerates, the frame delivery is uneven and it detracts from the gameplay. We will continue to monitor AMD’s drivers in this particular case.
Conclusion:
Do not forget to download and install the Catalyst Application Profiles (CAP) if applicable to your PC (they are downloaded in addition to Catalyst 13.1 from the same AMD support page).
To sum it up, we would recommend upgrading to either of these latest drivers because there are real advantages, and the pluses that we found outweigh the rare few negatives. The latest Catalyst drivers have incorporated all of the performance advantages of the “Never Settle” betas.
We have to also give our recommendation to the latest GeForce 310.90 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 as well as to continuing to measure the smoothness of frame rate delivery.
In the mean time, check ABT’s forum for the best tech discussions anywhere. You can expect an evaluation of Genius’ new PC Speakers tonight as well as an evaluation of Thermaltake’s Level 10 M mouse!
Happy gaming!
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How about giving a bit more information how you benchmark? Real gameplay with savegames (preferred) or integrated benchmarks?
thanks! great article!!
7970 GHZ EDITION IS A FACTORY OVERCLOCKED SOLUTION (AND EXISTS AT LOW QUANTITIES IN MARKET)
GTX680 IS NOT A OVERCLOCKED SOLUTION
COMPARING A DEFAULT CLOCKED SOLUTION WITH A RARE OVERCLOCKED SOLUTION IS STUPID AND UNFAIR….
Yo dawg if you read it you’ll see that they took a regular PowerColor card and overclocked it to 1050mhz on the core clock and 600 effective on the memory. It’s a regular 7970 card.