Catalyst 11-8 Performance Analysis – vs. 11.5 and GeForce 280.26

As part of an ongoing feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor is comparing the performance of 23 benchmarks with the current 11.8 WHQL monthly Catalyst driver release versus the one from a few months ago (May, Catalyst 11.5) . As an added bonus, timing has allowed us to also compare the Geforce 280.26 which we evaluated last week versus the 275.33 WHQL driver from June.

Best of all, this driver performance evaluation will give us a natural comparison between the performance improvements for GTX 580 and 550 series versus HD 6900 and 6700 series. Catalyst 11.8 was released last 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, we are also going to compare HD 6770 performance with the latest Catalyst drivers. For the Nvidia cards, we will test the GTX 580 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.

The last performance analysis of Catalyst 11.5 was published here.  Instead of going back and looking at 11.6 and 11.7, we are going to skip ahead to see what 3 months of AMD Catalyst driver updates brings us.  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 a midrange card also.  We are testing the GTX 580 versus the HD 6970 and the EVGA GTX 550 Ti versus the HIS HD 6770; the midrange cards are natural competitors that we benchmarked here.

We are using our overclocked Core i7-920 at 3.8 GHz and we use the same settings for the HD 6770 versus the GTX 550 Ti that we used for our The Passive Gigabyte & Overclocked HIS HD 6770 meet the EVGA GTX 550 Ti evaluation.  We use higher settings to test the HD 6970 and the GTX 580. For this driver performance analysis, we are not testing with CrossFire nor with SLI but will return to testing with them next month. The percentage of change from upgrading the drivers should remain about the same for any capable CPU platform.

We are going to test Catalyst 11.8 against Catalyst 11.5 using our current benchmark suite of 20 games plus three 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, and our video cards are a single HD 6770 and a HIS HD 6970 to represent the Radeons, and a GTX 580 and a EVGA GTX 550 Ti to represent the GeForce cards.

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.

Let’s get right to the test configuration, the driver release notes and the tests.