Catalyst 8.12 Performance

[ElMoIsEviL]

Actual Full Test here: ATI Catalyst 8.12 Performance Analysis


Q6600 @ 2.53GHz
4GB DDR2
ATi Radeon 4870 1GB
Vista Ultmate x64

Max In Game Settings:







4xAA 1680x1050

[ElMoIsEviL]

Essentially you're looking at this varying on your setup:

Call of Duty: World at War DX9 – performance gains of up to 21% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD48xx.

Crysis DX10 – performance gains of up to 25% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx.

Crysis Warhead DX10 – performance gains of up to 13% for Single card mode and up to 16% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx.

Devil May Cry 4 DX10 – performance gains of up to 6% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.

Fallout 3 – performance gains of up to 15% for Single card mode.

Far Cry 2 DX10 – performance gains of up to 10% for Single card mode and up to 57% in Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.

FEAR DX9 – performance gains of up to 6% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on Radeon HD4870X2 and HD4870.

Hellgate: London DX10 – performance gains of up to 6% for Single card mode and up to 10% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx.

Left 4 Dead DX9 – performance gains of up to 10% for Single card mode and up to 5% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4870 series.

Lost Planet Colonies DX10 – performance gains of up to 10% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.

Prey OGL – performance gains of up to 15% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on Radeon HD4870 1GB products, HD46xx, HD45xx.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky – performance gains of up to 10% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.

Unreal Tournament 3 DX9 – performance gains of up to 18% for Single card mode and up to 15% in Crossfire mode, especially in cases where AA is enabled. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.

[ElMoIsEviL]

To further compound the situation AMD's price drop has already taken effect.

$189.99 for a 4870 512MB
$224.99 for a 4870 1GB

[randomizer]

All of those improvements are nothing compared to what the 8.12 beta drivers do for 780G. There is a night-and-day improvement in 2D performance. Or, to be more accurate, performance is what you'd expect from having a driver installed instead of being barely better than no drivers.

[ElMoIsEviL]

Are you serious of kidding?

[randomizer]

Dead serious. Until now it is like AMD forgot the 780G (or HD3200 to be more correct) even exists, because the internet was covered with complaints about it. All the reviews praise it's 3D capabilities but nobody tried to use Firefox on it I guess. 2D performance on any other driver is absolutely horrendous. I was wondering how people could ever say that integrated graphics is fine for office work, because I would have quit my job if I needed to work with that.

[ElMoIsEviL]

Good to hear it was fixed. I tried Call of Duty World at War earlier and well I can play with every setting possible maxed (AA and AF maxed I mean Wide-tent 32x AA and 16xAF) at 1920x1200.

Performance is just ridiculously improved.

[randomizer]

I just hope the WHQL drivers didn't break what improvements they brought in the betas. I'm not sure I want to try them

[Afrodisiac]

I see the minimum FPS has taken a hit though. That's unnacceptable, it is the minimum FPS that makes a game, not it's maximum. Heck, my PC hits the occasional 170FPS in CSS, then it drops to 20 with action

[randomizer]

Average increased, which means it probably had a single low spike which dropped the minimum. You don't know how long it stayed that low without a log of framerate throughout the run.

[randomizer]

Well I've installed the WHQL drivers and it looks like nothing broke, performance is about the same in 2D mode. It's taken AMD 9 months to get a working driver for this chipset though.

[anticupidon]

Installed today....few minor improvement here and there.
Well i'm glad that everything works and reinstalled FAH ..
Let's see if my Radeon remembers how to crunch a few WUs

[Eurasianman]

Where's the folding@home numbers?

[brentpresley]

Where's the folding@home numbers?

We are waiting for a new FAH core to take advantage of stream. Until then, there is no improvement in folding.

[TSIMonster]

Well I've installed the WHQL drivers and it looks like nothing broke, performance is about the same in 2D mode. It's taken AMD 9 months to get a working driver for this chipset though.

You can't be serious? I have about 10 780G machines on 8.10 drivers currently and 2D performance is superb. About half of these have been running for a couple of months now and the users are completely happy.

I personally have an ASUS 780G board and its 2D performance seems snappier and smoother than my 4870 or 8800GT boxes.

Looking forward to trying these drivers on my 4870

[Eurasianman]

TSI, are you running XP or Vista on those 780G

[TSIMonster]

I believe 3 of them are vista ultimate 64 the others are xp pro sp3.

My personal box is Vista 64.

The 7 XP ones are workstation boxes here at work.

[ElMoIsEviL]

You guys might also like this. There are now a few games where a 4870 1GB can outpace a GTX 280 due to the new drivers.

Sapphire Radeon 4850 X2 Review




I also want to stress that the REAL performance driver is said to be the Catalyst 9.1s as I had indicated before. Many games have yet to be tweaked. AMD/ATi have pretty much removed any advantages the 180 series drivers gave to nVIDIA cards. This is actually quite an achievement as AMD/ATi have NEVER done this via a driver update (to my knowledge). Good idea to look at the Crysis DX10 results

[3lfk1ng]

AOC loves this driver.

[TSIMonster]

Awesome! I can't wait to get home a try it out.