Conclusion

With the Catalyst 12.11 Beta 8 we have added another driver to our graphic where we list the performance and power consumption of all the latest AMD drivers. Basically the Catalyst 12.11 Beta 8 is fighting with the Catalyst 12.11 Beta 4 for the performance crown and furthermore AMD has solved the issue regarding idle power consumption.

A closer look at the benchmark results shows, that performance wise there are almost no changes at all. In one benchmark the 12.11 Beta 8 is one percent ahead and in the other the 12.11 Beta 4 is one percent faster. In the end that is what we can also see from our performance rating. Overall AMD's latest 12.11 Beta 8 driver is a tiny bit more than 0.5 percent slower than their Beta 4 driver. If you start searching bigger differences, then you will find them with Battlefield III, Skyrim and StarCraft II. In case of Battlefield III the Beta 8 driver is about 3 percent faster than Beta 4, for Skyrim the Beta 4 driver is almost 8 percent faster than Beta 8 and under StarCraft II Beta 8 is a bit more than 3 percent behind Beta 4.

So really, the performance differences are no big deal, but these new drivers aren't really about performance. In fact there was a bug related to the C-states, which was almost doubling the power consumption of our testsystem when it was in idle. The problem was that the GPU didn't go in it's lowest P-state, meaning that the clock speed remained on a much higher frequency than usual. With their latest Beta 8 driver AMD took care of this issue and power consumption is back to normal at 65 Watts.

Author: Christian Ney c.ney@ocaholic.ch