SUMMARY: New Year, New Month and that can only mean one thing - ATI has released yet another set of their monthly Catalyst drivers for your Radeon based graphics cards. This time we are up to version 5.1 and we compare against the two previous versions (4.11 and 4.12) in our usual array of benchmarks. Has ATI continued the trend and increased Half Life 2 performance? Read on and find out if these drivers are worth the upgrade!
Processor(s): AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Motherboard(s): nVidia nForce 4 Reference (Supplied by nVidia) Video card(s): ATI Radeon X700PRO (Supplied by ATI) Memory: 2 X 256MB OCZ PC3200 2-2-2-5 Platinum (Supplied by OCZ) Hard Disk(s): Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA (Supplied by Western Digital)
Like last year we will be testing the latest drivers with our X700PRO and be testing them in our synthetic and real world gaming tests. We will be comparing the latest Catalyst 5.1s against the last two sets released which are 4.11 and 4.12.
3DMark2001 SE is a part of the popular 3DMark series. By combining DirectX 8.1 support with completely new graphics (including the GeForce4), it continues to provide benchmark results that empower you to make informed hardware assessments.
In 3DMark01 we can see that there is really no difference between the new drivers and the previous ones.