Introduction

This popped up a little out of nowhere. To be honest with how late we got the 11.10 Catalyst drivers from AMD last month, I'd figure we'd probably be getting these ones at the last minute as well. At the same time, it doesn't surprise me too much, though, that we're seeing them in the middle of the month.

No doubt AMD don't want to get into a pattern of releasing them at the absolute last minute of the month, especially more so with the next driver coming hopefully before Christmas next month, ideally before the 17th when I take my first holidays for the year.

When I saw the email come in that the driver was ready for download, one thing went through my head - another driver with no performance difference. Firing up the release notes, you'll quickly discover that my assumption was pretty much spot on.

Looking through the release notes, you're not going to see anything that really stands out with the main highlight for the drive being Flash Player 11 Support for GPU acceleration. Apart from that, there's not much else to say. Of course, that doesn't mean that there are no performance improvements, so let's look at the testbed and then get stuck into our lineup of benchmarks to see what's going on.