Introduction

I knew that the Catalyst drivers would come out on what was going to be my last day of work. It seems that ATI must've got the internal memo and decided to release them right on cue just to be a pain.

To be honest, though, this is exactly when I thought they would come out; the weekend before Christmas. So, have we got an early Christmas present from the Catalyst driver team, or have they left us a lump of coal?

There's only one way to really find out and that is to benchmark them on our HD 5000 series line-up of cards. Before we do that, though, let's have a quick look at the performance improvements that ATI are promising us.

- Performance Improvements

3DMark Vantage - overall performance improves as much as 9% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 and ATI Radeon HD 5700 series products. GT1 - Jane Nash performance improves as much as 15% and FT4 - GPU Cloth improves up to 15%

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat - Performance improves as much as 6% on single card configurations