Final Thoughts

I hate this driver. I really ran into so many problems with it. The first run with the HD 6970 saw some massive performance drops. Even doing a reinstall of the drivers didn't change it the first time. The second time I did the reinstall it finally worked.

Across the board the HD 6870 seemed to cop a bit of performance loss and at first I thought it was just because of something not going well in the initial setup, but I reinstalled the drivers, re downloaded the drivers and retested the card again after testing the HD 5870, and no matter what, performance was constantly down.

Outside of all that, I couldn't get into the Catalyst Control Center, as each time it said that no ATI card was present in the system. Although, if you check GPU-Z it says the 11.2s are installed, and if you actually check the performance it's pretty much spot on with both the HD 5870 and HD 6970.

I can't remember the last time I told someone not to bother with a driver release from AMD, but this is honestly one I would be avoiding. I'll still be using only up to the 11.1s in future AMD reviews, at least until the 11.3s come out.

I'm not sure if these issues are just specific to me, but to be honest, when most people have complained about driver issues, I've never seen the problem, and I test a lot of cards and a lot of drivers. This time, though, it's just no dice.

I'd probably wait for the 11.3s and stick to what you're currently using this time around.