Introduction

I think the first thing we can say is that it's nice to see that AMD got the Catalyst out on time this month and it did indeed come out during March unlike the Catalyst 12.2 which fell into March.

The second thing is that this is a weird driver release. The Catalyst 12.2 was labeled as 12.3 and it made us wonder a bit. Was AMD just throwing an earlier version of the 12.3 drivers out there to keep up with the monthly schedule? In the end we'll probably never know the truth.

Before we cover the performance side of things, though, with the new drivers let's quickly just look at some of the release note highlights below.

Once that we'll quickly cover our test system and get into our typical Catalyst benchmark line up.

Release Note Highlights

NEW FEATURES

Full Support for AMD Radeon HD 7000 series of products

Catalyst 12.3 now fully supports the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800 and AMD Radeon HD 7700 series of products

Resolved Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System

This section provides information on resolved known issues in this release of the AMD Catalyst 12.3 software suite for Windows 7. These include:

AMD Catalyst Control Center startup issues/ delays have been resolved

Tom Clancy HAWX: No longer crashes after task switching with MLAA (Morphological Anti-Aliasing) and Anti-Aliasing enabled

Furmark Benchmark: No longer crashes when launched in High Performance mode.

Quake 4: No longer display corruption after task switching when run in High Performance mode

XPlane: Textures no longer exhibit flicker and corruption

Skyrim: No longer displays flickering and texture corruption.

Alan Wake: A system crash is no longer experienced when running the game in DirectX 9 mode with Crossfire enabled

Far Cry 2: A random system hang is no longer experienced when running the game at high in game setting