ATI Catalyst 7.12 Analysis - XP & Vista

Introduction

Ho Ho Ho! We hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year, and if you have bought yourself a new Radeon based graphics card over the holiday period there is no doubt you want to see if it's worth jumping to the newer Catalyst 7.12 driver suite.

Let's not delay as we have some performance improvements promised which you can see mentioned below.

Performance Improvements Note

3DMark2005: Performance improves 5% or more with largest gains noticed when Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering are disabled on systems containing either an ATI Radeon™ HD 2400 or ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 series of products

Company of Heroes: DX10 performance improves up to 5% on systems containing an ATI Radeon™ HD38x0 series of product

We receive the Catalyst drivers before they go up on the AMD website and before the release notes are written. While we don't always get the opportunity to test the particular applications that are mentioned in the release notes, we try to cover all our bases by testing Synthetic, Real World, HDR, OpenGL, Direct3D along with AA and AF.

If there is an application improvement that we haven't tested feel free to use the forums and comment on anything you notice.

Moving on…