Conclusion

A direct comparison between driver version 11.12 and 12.7 Beta (8.981.2) 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 12.7 Beta there is a smaller improvement in games on average. A closer look at the synthetic benchmarks shows that there is a noticeable performance increase in 3DMark 11 where the score is 1.5 % 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 12.2 and newer 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 and also fixed the bug occuring when benchmarking TessMark using Insane mode.

Shifting the focus to games there is also a noticeable increase in performance. In our performance rating we see an average increase of almost 23 percent compared to the first retail drivers and 8.2 percent compared to the Catalyst 12.4. Going from Catalyst 12.4 to 12.7 Beta (8.981.2) you will see an improvement especially in Alien vs Predator, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City, DIRT 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and finally Crysis 2. For DIRT 2 and BattleField 3 we saw a 3 % improvement in performance which is not much but good to have anyway. For Alien vs Predator it's a bit more with 4.6 %. Now comes the "big" numbers with a gain of 7.6 % under Batman: Arkham City and 9 % for Crysis 2. Regarding Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim there is no less than respectively 25 and 38 percent gain in performance which tell us that there were some bugs under those games that were holding the performance back and now are fixed. The looser here is Dragon Age II which unfortunately loses 3 % but anyway seen the gain you have on other games we see no way to not use this driver just because it is performing worse by 3 % under one game.

There were two drivers released on june 12 which are the one we tested here labeled 8.981.2 and the one we tested previously named 9.00.0. This 9.00.0 beta disapointed us because they killed the performance under Dragon Age II by 34 % coming from 51 fps (Catalyst 12.4) to 37 fps. Luckily this 8.981.2 doesn't have this problem and are also fixing a performance problem under Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 as we saw an improvement of 20 % we only noticed once using the Catalyst 12.3.

Keeping your drivers 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. This Catalyst driver 12.7 Beta from June 12 (8.981.2) is the best AMD driver because it fixes a lot of performance glitches and also have the best performance ratio.