AMD just released two new Catalyst drivers for their graphics cards. According to the changelog the 12.10 WHQL one isn't really special and the 12.11 Beta is very special because on the paper it "introduces significant performance improvements for many games across all 28nm AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series products". That's what we are going to check in this article, comparing those last drivers under more or less recent games and benchmarks with previous drivers.
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Introduction
Find all the benchmarks/games results on the following pages.
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Test Setup
Hardware
| Mainboard |
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| CPUs |
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| Memory |
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| Graphic Cards (Driver) |
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| Drivers |
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| HDD |
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| PSU |
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Benchmarks and Games Settings
Futuremark
- 3DMark 11
(1.0.3)
- GPU Test - Performance Preset
- 3DMark Vantage (1.1.0)
- GPU Test - Performance Preset
Unigine Heaven DX11 Benchmark
| Version | 3.0 |
| API | DirectX 11 |
| Tessellation | Extreme |
| Shaders | High |
| Anisotropy | 16x |
| Stereo 3D | Disabled |
| Anti-aliasing | 8x |
| Full Screen | Yes |
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
Geeks3D TessMark
| Version | 0.3.0 |
| Map Set | Set 4 (2048 x 204 |
| Tesselation | Insane (x64) |
| Full Screen | Yes |
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Anti-aliasing | 8x |
| Tessellation | High |
| Duration | 60000 (ms) |
Geeks3D FurMark (Burn-in test)
| Version | 1.10.0 |
| Full Screen | Yes |
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Anti-aliasing | 8x MSAA |
Alien vs Predator DX11 Benchmark
| Texture Quality | Very High |
| Shadow Quality | High |
| Hardware Tesselation | Yes |
| Advance Shadow Sampling | Yes |
| Full Srceen Anti-Aliasing Samples | 4x |
| Anisotropic Filtering | 16x |
| SSAO | On |
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
Batman: Arkham City Integrated Benchmark
| FullScreen | Yes |
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| V Sync | No |
| Anti-Aliasing | 8x MSAA |
| Stereoscopic 3D Status | No |
| DirectX 11 Features | MVSS And HBAO |
| DirectX 11 Tesselation | High |
| Detail Level | Extreme |
| Dynamic Shadow | Yes |
| Motion Blur | Yes |
| Distortion | Yes |
| Lens Flares | Yes |
| Light Shafts | Yes |
| Reflections | Yes |
| Ambient Occlusion | Yes |
| Hardware Accelerated PhysX | Off |
Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3 (5 Minutes GamePlay)
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| FullScreen | On |
| Vertical Sync | Off |
| Field of view | 70 |
| Motion Blur Amount | Max |
| Graphics Quality | Ultra |
BattleField 3 (5 Minutes GamePlay)
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Aspect Ratio | Wide 16:9 |
| Anti-Aliasing | 4x |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 60 Hz |
| Sync Every Frame | No |
| Shadows | Yes |
| Specular Map | Yes |
| Depth Of Field | Yes |
| Screen Space Ambient Occlusion | High Quality |
| Soften Smoke Edges | Yes |
| Bullet Impacts | Yes |
| Image Quality | Ultra |
Crysis 2 DX11 + HiRes Texture Pack Benchmark
| Quality | Ultra |
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Anti-Aliasing | 4x |
| Map | Central Park/Adrenaline |
| Runs | 1 |
| API | DirectX 11 |
| Edge AA | Edge AA |
| Hi-Res Textures | On |
DIRT 2 Integrated Benchmark
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Refresh Rate | 60 |
| MultiSampling | 8x MSAA |
| VSync | Off |
| Aspect Ration | 16:9 |
| Details | Ultra Preset |
Dragon Age II (5 Minutes GamePlay)
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Full Screen Mode | Yes |
| Renderer | DirectX 11 |
| Vertical Sync | no |
| Graphics Detail | Very High |
| Anti-Aliasing | 8x |
| Anisotropic Filtering | 16x |
| Screen Space Ambient Occlusion | Yes |
| Diffusion Depth of Field | Yes |
| High Quality Blur | Yes |
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (5 Minutes GamePlay)
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Aspect Ratio | Wide 16:9 |
| Anti-Aliasing | 8x |
| Anisotropic-Filtering | 16x |
| Details | Ultra |
| Vertical Sync | Disabled |
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat Benchmark
| Preset | Ultra |
| Renderer | Enhan. full dyn. lighting (DX11) |
| Video Mode | 1920 x 1080 |
| MSAA | 4x |
| MSAA for A-tested objects | DX10.0 Style [Standard] |
| SSAO Mode | HDAO |
| SSAO Quality | High |
| Use DX10.1 | No |
| Enable Tesselation | Yes |
| Contact Hardening Shadows | Yes |
StarCraft II (5 Minutes GamePlay)
| Display Mode | Fullscreen |
| Refresh Rate | Default |
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Vertical Sync | No |
| Texture Quality | Ultra |
| Graphics Quality | Ultra |
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3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
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Unigine Heaven
TessMark
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Alien vs Predator
Batman: Arkham City
DIRT 2
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Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3
BattleField 3
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Crysis 2
Dragon Age 2
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
StarCarft 2
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Power Consumption
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Benchmark Summary
Synthetic Benchmarks
Games
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Performance Index
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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
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