Battle of the Betas – GF 326.19 vs. Catalyst 13.8 Performance Analysis – 30 games

As part of a regular feature for AlienBabelTech, we are charting the performance of 34 benchmarks with last week’s 13.8 Beta “frame pacing” Catalyst driver using a single HD 7970 and also at GHz Edition speeds. We will compare HD 7970 single-GPU performance versus the previous Catalyst 13-6 Beta and also versus the latest Geforce 326.18 beta divers..

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 HD 7970 at GHz Edition speeds. Both sets of beta drivers were released quite recently and we naturally ask ourselves if the performance improvements for the Radeon HD 7970 will move the GHz edition ahead of the GTX 770.

We are going to test Catalyst 13.8 beta and GeForce 326.19 beta 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 7×0 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.