Catalyst 11.10 Performance Analysis – vs. GeForce 285.62
As part of an ongoing feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor is comparing the performance of 25 benchmarks with the current 11.10 WHQL monthly Catalyst driver release versus the one from last month. As an added bonus, timing has again allowed us to also compare the Geforce 285.62 divers which we evaluated last week.
This driver performance evaluation will give us a natural comparison between the performance improvements for the GTX 580/590 and the 550 series versus the HD 6970 including CrossFire, and the 57×0/67×0 series. Catalyst 11.10 was released this week and we naturally ask ourselves if there are any performance improvements for the Radeon 6000 series in games.
Beside testing with a single HD 6970 and HD 6970 CrossFire, we are also going to compare HD 6770 performance with the latest Catalyst drivers. For the Nvidia cards, we will test the GTX 580, the GTX 590 and the GTX 560 Ti so as to give a sampling of high and mid-performance cards. And of course, we will compare the AMD and Nvidia cards to each other at identical settings.
Our last performance analysis of Catalyst 11.9 was published here. And we will naturally compare the GeForce drivers with the Radeon drivers and directly compare competing cards – the top single-GPU card from each vendor and competing midrange cards also. HD 6970 CrossFire is faster than a GTX 590 which are two downclocked GTX 580 cores in internal SLI, but we are adding the top GeForce card anyway. We are benching the GTX 580 versus the HD 6970 and the EVGA GTX 550 Ti versus the HIS HD 6770 – high end and midrange gaming cards.
The percentage of change from upgrading the drivers should remain about the same for any capable CPU platform. We are going to test Catalyst 11.10 against Catalyst 11.9 using our current benchmark suite of 22 games plus 3 synthetic benchmarks, Heaven 2.0, 3DMark 11 and Vantage. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit using Intel Core i7-920 at 3.80 GHz, 6 GB DD3.
The HD 6970 and the GTX 580 are tested at higher settings and resolutions generally than the midrange cards as noted on the charts. All of our games are tested at two of these three resolutions: 2560×1600, 1920×1080, 1680×1050, with 16xAF, and we use DX11/10/10.1 whenever possible with an emphasis on DX11 games. As an added bonus, the HD 6770 has identical performance to the HD 5770 and they can be interchanged performance-wise and even used together in CrossFire.
Let’s get right to the test configuration, the driver release notes and the tests.
Could you possibly include single cards from for example the HD4000 and GT200 series in the next test, with a comparison with the latest drivers you tested for those series?
Apart from showing users with those cards if the drivers are worth updating or not, it also gives a good indication about how much AMD/Nvidia strives to improve performance on their older cards
I’ll try. It is a matter of time pressure. The driver test needs to be current to be relevant. We realize that a lot of gamers are using HD 4000 and GTX 200 series.
Thanks for answering!
Would be great if you could manage getting them in there to show us how much later drivers matter for older series, especially since the release notes are very focused on the newer cards right now
I understand that it takes alot of time to make these benchmark comparisons and I’m really thankful that you take your time making them, I appreciate them alot