Introduction

With the release of the new i7 platform from Intel I have to admit that the latest Catalyst release did sneak up on me. With the release of a new platform, though, I was intrigued to find out if ATI would offer anything on the performance front.

Looking through the release notes, ATI has made a promise for performance increases in Far Cry 2 with gains as high as 14% when in Crossfire, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is being promised gains of up to 30% when using CrossfireX. Fortunately, both games also offer performance increases for single card setups.

Performance Improvements

The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst™

FarCry 2 - performance gains of 3 to 10% for Single card mode and 8 to 14% in Crossfire mode, with some specific configurations showing even greater improvements. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and Radeon HD3xxx products.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky - performance gains of 6 to 18% in single card settings and 10 to 30% in CrossfireX mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD04xxx and Radeon HD3xxx products.