Conclusion

Three weeks ago AMD released their latest driver for their graphics card, the Catalyst 12.9 Beta. Yes we know we are late, but better late than never right? Anyway results are in and here is what we see compared to the previous driver that was the Catalyst 12.8 WHQL:

The Catalyst 12.9 Beta is performing better under 3DMark Vantage by 5.6 % which is a lot considering that is a very old synthetic benchmark.

Other synthetic benchmarks we used didn't have any significative performance changes.

Performance under Alien vs. Predator and Batman: Arkham City was exactly the same.

DIRT 2 sees a performance increase by 1.0 %.

Our CrossFire setup was 10 % faster under Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3.

Performance under Battlefield 3 decreased by 9 %.

AMD fixed the bug under Dragon Age 2 which brings now no less than 45 % in performance.

Performance bug fixed under TES Skyrim as well which results of an increase of 16 %.

We were finally able to run the unofficial Crysis 2 Benchmark, it always worked unsing a single graphics card or nVidia SLI but that's the first time we had it working with AMD Crossfire.

Power consumption under idle went back to normal (65 Watts).

So in the end the Catalyst 12.9 Beta were better by 6.67 % in average under games than the 12.8 WHQL that came out the month before. Performance was almost the same everywhere (<1% diffrerence) but under Dragon Age, Skyrim and Battelfield where the difference in performance was higher than 10 %. Looking at the power consumption the 12.9 Beta is a good driver, power consumption value under idle is back to normal. The WHQL driver was bad as AMD's Power Zero feature wasn't working with this driver. We would say go for the Catalyst 12.9 Beta whithout hesitating if you are still using older drivers.




Author: Christian Ney c.ney@ocaholic.ch

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 8 - Crysis 2 / Dragon Age 2
Page 2 - Test Setup & Specifications	Page 9 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. / The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim / StarCraft 2
Page 3 - Benchmarks and Games Settings	Page 10 - Power Consumption
Page 4 - 3D Mark 11 / 3D Mark Vantage	Page 11 - Summary Benchmark Results
Page 5 - Unigine Heaven / TessMark	Page 12 - Performance Index
Page 6 - Alien vs. Predator / Batman: Arkham City / Dirt 2	Page 13 - Conclusion
Page 7 - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 / BattleField 3

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