Conclusion

When looking at the performance offered by the Catalyst 12.9 Beta one can see that it is much like the performance of the Catalyst 12.7 Beta from june 25. Last time we were a bit disappointed by the Catalyst 12.8 WHQL drivers because of the three following things:
- Performance under Dragon Age II went from 50 fps average to 37 fps
- Batman Arkham City was freezing loading
- Power consumption under load was 20 watts higher than with previous drivers.

AMD seems to have fixed those drivers issues as this time we didn't notice anything abnormal at all. They even are the best drivers we ever tested on the Radeon HD 7970 on average. Compared to the 12.8 WHQL we saw an improvement lower than 1 % everywhere but in 3DMark Vantage where it's the first time we score that high using stock settings, 32'040 points. AMD fixed (again) the performance problem under Dragon Age II we saw the first time using the Catalyst 12.xB from June 25, and again with the Catalyst 12.8 WHQL. The power consumption too is back to normal with 250 Watts under heavy load against the 270 Watts we measured last time (12.8 WHQL).

Did AMD listened  to us? Not that they only fixed the issues we spotted last time but it looks like they also made sure that the 12.9 Beta will never perform lower than the 12.8 WHQL for our test setup as we didn't measure any decrease in performance.

Author: Christian Ney c.ney@ocaholic.ch