Conclusion

A direct comparison between driver version 11.12 and 12.4 shows some really drastic improvements. Installing the latest drivers results in quite a lot more performance especially regarding modern DirectX 11 games. A closer look at the synthetic benchmarks shows that especially in TessMark there is almost an explosion going on. With the 12.4 driver installed we saw 2.5 times the performance then with driver version 11.12. In Futuremarks 3D Mark Vantage and 3D Mark 11 there is also a notable difference but it's way lower. The TessMark result also explains why our performance ratio regarding the synthetic 3D benchmarks shows an increase of 44 percent. AMD has made a major improvement concerning tessellation compared to the first drivers that supported the Radeon HD 7970.

Shifting the focus to games there is also a notable increase in performance. In our performance rating we see an average increase of 14 percent. Especially Battlefield 3, Crysis 2 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim benefit from the latest drivers. AMD was working hard on improving the drivers for DirectX 11 games and therefore you get 23 percent more performance in Battlefield 3, 24 percent more in Crysis 2 and 32 percent more in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

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 90 Watt when the 11.12 driver were installed. With the 12.4 driver the system needed 77 Watts to run. Therefore power efficiency was increased by a whopping 14 percent under idle conditions. There is also a measurable improvement when the cards are under load. In this case the system needed 252 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.