Last week AMD released new drivers for its Catalyst graphics cards, the ATI Radeon line, boasting huge performance increases in a large number of games, particularly newer games like BioShock, Company of Heroes and Lost Planet that support DirectX 10.
Now when I said AMD were boasting huge performance increases I wasn’t joking. According to AMD GAME the following performance increases are noticed with Catalyst 7.10 drivers:
-Battlefield 2142: CrossFireTM performance improves 5-23% on ATI RadeonTM HD2600, HD2400 and ATI RadeonTM X1300/X1550
-BioShock DX10 CrossFireTM performance improves 70% or more on all ATI RadeonTM HD2x00 series of products
-Call of Duty 2: performance improves up to 6.7% on both single card and CrossFireTM ATI RadeonTM HD2600 and ATI RadeonTM HD2400 configurations
-Call of Juarez DX10: CrossFireTM performance improves up to 42% and single card performance improves up to 34% on all ATI RadeonTM
-HD2x00 series of products
-Company of Heroes DX10 CrossFireTM performance improves up to 80% on all ATI RadeonTM HD2x00 series of products and single card performance improves as much as 31% on ATI RadeonTM HD2900 and ATI RadeonTM HD2600 products
-Enemy Territory: Quake Wars CrossFireTM performance improves as much as 23% on ATI RadeonTM X1x00 series products and single card performance improves as much as 23% on both ATI RadeonTM HD2x00 and ATI RadeonTM X1x00 series of products
-FEAR CrossFireTM performance improves as much as 16% on ATI RadeonTM X1950XTX, X1650XT, HD2400 and X1300/X1550
-Lost Planet DX10 CrossFireTM performance improves 20% or greater on all ATI RadeonTM HD2x00 series of products
-Supreme Commander CrossFireTM performance improves up to 30% on all ATI RadeonTM HD2x00 and ATI RadeonTM X1x00 series products. ATI RadeonTM X1650 and X1300/X1550 see even greater improvements of 82% or more
-World In Conflict DX10 CrossFireTM performance improves 14-67% or more and single card performance improves 20% or more on ATI RadeonTM HD2900XT and ATI RadeonTM HD2600 products
-World in Conflict DX9 CrossFireTM performance improves up to 70% or more on all ATI RadeonTM HD2x00 products
The first thing you’ll notice while perusing the above list is that the majority of the performance increases are only achieved when using CrossFire, which like NVIDIAs SLI technology, involves installing two identical graphics cards on your computer and linking them together. This is of course a very costly upgrade as you literally have to double your video card budget, to achieve frame rates that a single NVIDIA 8800GTX can surpass.
Now these percentages are all well and good, but all that matters to gamers is real-world benchmark results, and thanks to PC Perspective here they are:
As you can see from the above benchmarks, there are some very impressive improvements for BioShock and Company of Heroes. It might not be 70-80% but any gain is good when it comes to driver updates. The other, and probably more worrying thing you can see in the above benchmarks is the huge gap between the 2900XT and the 8800GTX. NVIDIA has a phenomenal performance advantage in all three games and even after a quite impressive driver update the gap is still very significant. It seems AMD has a lot of work to do if they ever want to catch up to NVIDIA.
Now for all my doom and gloom when it comes to the Radeon cards lack of performance compared to NVIDIAs offerings, for people who already have a CrossFire setup these drivers will be a terrific, and even single card users will see increases in frame rates in all of their games so they are definitely a must for all Radeon owners.
A full update log as well as the drivers can be found at AMDs Driver Page.
[via Register Hardware]
