Introduction

As we're rolling towards the second half of August, we saw the other day that AMD released its Catalyst 11.8 driver suite a bit quicker than when I initially thought it would be. To be honest, though, if you think about the fact that when we saw the release of the WHQL 11.7 driver suite we also saw the beta preview of the 11.8s, AMD no doubt were getting close to having the 11.8s ready, so again, the fact that they're a little earlier than normal doesn't come as too much of a surprise.

I was a little slower this month than previous months due to the fact that I didn't expect the drivers so early, but even more so due to the fact that everything had to be retested as we move over to our new testbed and benchmark line up.

While our games might not always be specific to the performance highlights, with so many games using similar engines we quite often find that a gain promised in one area can also be shown in another. Of course, there's always the opportunity to drop us a line and let us know your own experience, good or bad.

So with that all that said and done, let's take a look at some of the release note highlights before we take a closer look at our testbed and get into the performance side of things.

Release Note Highlights

New Features

AMD Overdrive has been enhanced to include both CPU and GPU over-clocking controls within the AMD Vision Control Center

CPU over-clocking is only supported on AMD Black edition CPUs

Performance Highlights

Improves performance up to 10% in Crysis 2 DirectX 11 version for both non-Anti-Aliasing, and application enabled Anti-Aliasing cases on the AMD Radeon HD 6000 and AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series

Improves performance up to 8% in Fear 3 DirectX 11 version with application enabled Anti-Aliasing on the AMD Radeon HD 6000 and AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series

Improves performance up to 30% when AMD's Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) is enabled through the Catalyst Control Center on the AMD Radeon HD 6000 and AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series

Improves performance up to 20% in Call of Duty Black Operations for single GPU and Multi-GPU configurations on the AMD Radeon HD 6000 and AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series