Catalyst 10-4 Performance Analysis featuring Win 7 and 5870 series

As part of an ongoing feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor will be comparing the performance of 22 benchmarks with the current monthly Catalyst driver release versus the one from the previous month. Catalyst 10-4 was just released at the end of last month with an impressive feature set that finally included H.264 level 5.1 support.  However, we naturally ask ourselves if there any performance improvements for the new Radeon 5000 series in games.

We are going to test Catalyst 10.3a against Catalyst 10.4 using our current benchmark suite of 19 games plus three synthetic benchmarks. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit using Core i7 920 at 3.80 GHz, 6 GB DD3, and our video card is HD 5870. All of our games are tested at 2560×1600, 1920×1200 and 1680×1050 resolutions and with maxed-out in-game settings plus 4xAA/16xAF and we use DX11/10/10.1 whenever possible.

Let’s get right to the test configuration and the tests.