Conclusion

A direct comparison between driver version 11.12 and 12.6 shows some really drastic improvements. Installing the latest drivers results in quite a lot more performance especially regarding modern DirectX 11 games. But if you look at the latest WHQL 12.4 driver versus the latest Beta there is only a small improvement in games. A closer look at the synthetic benchmarks shows that there is a noticeable performance increase in 3DMark 11 where the score is 2 % higher. Otherwise there is almost no difference at all. But still it's good to know for overclockers, that the latest drivers can help increase benchmarking performance by a small margin. Concerning TessMark we saw a 2.5 times increase when we compare driver version 11.12 and 12.6 to version 11.12, which also explains why our performance ratio regarding the synthetic 3D benchmarks shows an increase of 46 percent with the latest drivers. AMD has made major improvements concerning tessellation compared to the first drivers that supported the Radeon HD 7970.

Shifting the focus to games there is also a noticeable increase in performance. In our performance rating we see an average increase of 17 percent compared to the first retail drivers and 3 percent compared to the Catalyst 12.4. Going from Catalyst 12.4 to 12.6 Beta you will see an improvement especially in Alien vs Predator, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. For Alien vs Predator we saw a 5 % improvement in performance. Regarding The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim there is no less than 27 percent gain in performance, looks like there was a bug in the Catalyst 12.4 drivers that was keeping the performance of this game on a lower level.

Interesting is also the power consumption. We measured our testsystems power consumption under idle and load conditions. When there was no load the system needed 67 Watt when the 11.12 driver were installed. With the 12.6 Beta driver the system needed only 60 Watts to run. Therefore power efficiency increased by a whopping 11.6 percent under idle conditions. There is also a measurable improvement when the card is under load. In this case the system needed 246 Watt with 12.4 driver and 260 Watt with 11.12 drivers.

Keeping your dirvers up-to-date is really important if you're a gamer because you benefit not only from better performance but also from increased energy efficiency. And we have to say, those Catalyst drivers 12.6 Unofficial Beta from June 4 are the best AMD drivers so far.