ATI Catalyst 9.8 Vista Driver Analysis

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Manufacturer: AMD

Introduction

I have to say that when I saw the list of performance improvements on the latest set of Catalyst drivers I was shocked. What was even more interesting, though, was the fact that they’re not a bunch of performance improvements that are aimed at Windows 7, but if you have a quick look at what exactly AMD are offering us it's also clear that they've helped remove an important problem that is seen on so many systems.

What we're seeing is that most gains are seen on big dual CrossFire X setups that find themselves CPU limited. Since graphics cards tend to move faster than CPUs, it's not uncommon for CPU limitations to be an issue. This is one of the main reasons we have our CPU overclocked at 3.8GHz, to give the graphics cards we test a fair and balanced scoring pattern.

Anyway, have a quick look below to see what exactly is on offer before we dive into the test setup and straight into the benchmarks.

Performance Improvements

Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 - performance improves up to 15-50% in CPU limited settings with the largest gains in CrossfireX configurations

Company of Heroes DirectX 10 - performance improves by up to 10-77% in CPU limited settings

Crysis DirectX 10 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 10% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 34% in CPU limited settings

Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 7% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 69% in CPU limited settings

Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 50% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 88% in CPU limited settings

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 - Dual CrossfireX performance improves up to 40% in CPU limited settings with Quad CrossfireX performance improving up to 60% in CPU limited settings

UnigineTropics OpenGL - performance improves 5-20%

UnigineTropics DirectX 10 - Quad CrossfireX performance improves 5-20% in CPU limited settings

World in Conflict DirectX 10 - performance improves by 5-10%