Conclusion

AMD announced it's latest Catalyst driver to bring significant performance improvements for many games across all 28nm AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series products. Up to 15 % in a lot of games they said ... They said, because here we haven't seen anything like that. Yes we don't have a lot of games that were in AMD's changelog list and our games aren't that recent anymore. But when AMD says that finally this driver is able to use the whole power of the HD 7000 series' architecture then the performance improvements should be seen everywhere not only under specific games.

We measured what we call a "performance improvement" only under BattleField and 3DMark11. If we compare the 12.10 WHQL and the 12.11 Beta for exemple you can see that the 12.11 Beta are 11 % faster on 3DMark11 and no less than 40 % on BattleField 3.

I don't know about you but when I see that for more than 6 months we are stuck at 8'000 points under 3DMark and from one day to another you have almost 9'000 points, this doesn't look very credible to me. To me it appears much more likely that AMD changed a specific setting in the driver or created a special profile in order to show way higher results. If this gain was also visible under other benchmarks and games I would agree on the magic drivers but at the moment I stay skeptic.

That was for the good side, because yes there is a down side. We measured really unusual power consumption when the system was in idle. Not those 3-5 Watts you can usually see, this time it's no less than 40 Watts. Our system was drawing 55 % more power in idle than ever before. I first thought that was a problem related to my system, I checked again all the power saving features although I didn't change anything since last time. Then I decided to uninstall the 12.10 WHQL and install the 12.11 WHQL to see if the issue is still present. It was, so I uninstalled the 12.11 Beta and installed a known working driver back, which in this case was the 12.9 Beta. After that power consumption was back to normal aka 65 Watts. Reinstalling the 12.1x drivers gave me again 104 Watts when idle.
I wanted to know where this was coming from so I started to monitor the graphics card and here is what I saw:

Looks like the Catalyst 12.10 WHQL and 12.11 Beta fail to reach the lowest P-State. Therefore the voltage stays high, and the clocks too. 500 MHz for the GPU and 1375 MHz for the memory instead of 300 and 150 MHz. The temperature is of course high too.

So in the end to have a performance improvement in games it's nice but this P-State bug isn't nice at all, it has to be fixed asap. We do not recommand the use of those last drivers until AMD fixed this issue.

Below a link (click the image) to the Meme gallery that Christian just made.

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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