Conclusion

It has turned out that two different drivers dated from june 12th did hit the web (not at the same time), the Catalyst 12.x Beta we tested last time and the Catalyst 12.7 Beta we tested here. Although they are both dated 12th june it was interesting to see they don't perform the same.
So let's see what we noticed when testing the system after updating from the Catalyst 12.x Beta (june 12) to the Catalyst 12.7 Beta (june 12):

The Catalyst 12.7 Beta is performing worse under Synthetic benchmarks by 0.6 % in average, which is not a big deal.

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

DIRT 2 sees a performance reduction by 1.0 %.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 lost a noticeable 5 %.

A gain from 0.4 % up to 1 % was noticed for BattleField 3, Crysis 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Performance under StarCraft II went from 89.63 fps to 87 fps.

AMD fixed the bug under

Dragon Age 2 which brings now no less than 40 % in performance.

Power consumption under load and idle went up.

So in the end the Catalyst 12.7 Beta were better by 3.26 % in average under games than the 12.x Beta that came out the same day. Performance was almost the same everywhere but under Dragon Age where the 12.xB had a bug that killed performance which wasn't present in the 12.7B. Looking at the power consumption the 12.7 Beta are bad, in idle the system was drawing 14 Watts more and 32 Watts under load.

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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