Introduction

We've been so busy with the new HD 4800 series of cards that I honestly thought I would never get the time to really look at what's going on with the latest Catalyst release.

With some good performance promises this time around, we'll have to see how the new driver set goes on our mighty test bed.

3DMark Vantage:10 to 15% gains across all Radeon™ HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, with larger gains in specific cases.

Call of Duty 4: Performance increases across all Radeon™ HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, with gains as large as 35% in specific maps.

Call of Juarez DX10: Performance increases between 2 and 9% across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products

Company of Heroes (DX10 version): Performance increases between 4 and 10% across HD 36xx and HD 34xx products.

Lost Planet (DX10 version): Performance increases by 1 or 2 fps across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, creating in some cases up to 20% increase.

Lost Planet (DX9 version): Performance increases between 2 and 20% across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products

Prey OpenGL: 3-5% gains across HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products.

Quake 4 OpenGL: Up to 8% increase across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products.

Shadermark 2.1: Minor improvements across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, with the largest gains appearing on HD 3650 (up to 9%)

ViewPerf 10: Substantial performance improvements across several of the sub-tests, with the largest gains in ugnx (up to 55%), catia (up to 17%) and tcvis (up to 10%) across all of the HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products.

Let's see if we get any gains in our test system here today.