Introduction

As we roll into another year and the first month comes to a close, it comes as no surprise that we begin to see a new iteration of the Catalyst driver suite. As you would've guessed, we're dealing now with the 11 series driver and being both the first one and the January one, the exact name is the 11.1 driver.

This has been a little weird this time around, as AMD actually released a hot fix version of the driver before the official WHQL one. This is something we're seeing more and more from them and it will be interesting if over time we continue to see "monthly" WHQL drivers, instead of just "monthly" driver updates.

The thing is, over the recent months we've seen the official WHQL driver come followed by a bunch of non WHQL hot fix versions. We know the WHQL process takes time, and we would assume it also costs money, so it will be interesting to see if anything changes in 2011.

With that said, it's almost time to look at the performance the new drivers offer, but let's first just check out some of the highlights from the release notes.

Performance Improvements

F1 2010

- Performance increases up to 12% on AMD Radeon HD 6900 and AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.

- Performance increases up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.

Left 4 Dead 2

- Performance increases up to 17% on AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series single and Crossfire configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.

- Performance increases up to 8% on AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series single configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.