Conclusion

Our express-test of ATI Catalyst 9.5 drivers not only confirmed that the performance does in fact improve in the games and benchmarks specified in the driver release notes, but also revealed some unexpected improvements in a few additional applications, such as Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. and 3DMark Vantage.

Just like in our previous articles of the same kind, at this point we can conclude that ATI still sticks to its promises: we see performance improving where it is supposed to. Although it is not always up to the specified levels, it is important to remember that we are talking about “up to 10%” gain, and not “10%+”. Moreover, we have to repeat once again that the CPU we use in our testbed is definitely not one of those solutions that may have any more or less serious effect on gaming performance.

As for the general tendencies, the programmers from AMD graphics division who are responsible for Catalyst drivers and Catalyst Control Center development are evidently focusing their main efforts on improving the performance of the CrossFireX technology, although single-GPU solutions also get some. Moreover, they keep fixing a lot of small and not very small issues in the new Catalyst and CCC versions, and even though these issues are not fatal, they are in fact pretty annoying. All of the fixes are described in detail in the driver release notes and it is certainly a great thing.

We didn’t detect any serious performance drops on transition from Catalyst 9.4 to Catalyst 9.5. The only exception is a 4% drop Radeon HD 4770 showed in BattleForge game in 1280x1024 resolution. Therefore, we have every reason to recommend all owners of contemporary ATI Radeon HD 4000 graphics cards to upgrade to the new Catalyst 9.5 driver.