by Sergey Lepilov
08/17/2009 | 01:16 PM
Today, on the 17th of August, 2009, AMD is introducing its new driver for Radeon series graphics cards. The Catalyst driver is regularly updated once in a month, the new version being number 9.8. The driver is WHQL-certified by Microsoft and is the second Catalyst version to support the new operating system Windows 7 besides the widespread Windows XP and Windows Vista. In this report I am going to benchmark two graphics cards with the new driver.
First, let’s see what changes are declared for the new Catalyst. The new interface of the Control Panel has been inherited by version 9.8 (00_cat98) from the previous 9.7, and I think it is indeed more user-friendly and intuitive. However, it is gaming performance that we all are interested in. Radeon HD 4870 X2 and HD4xxx-based CrossFireX tandems are claimed to deliver a 50% performance boost at resolutions of 1680x1050 and higher in certain games, e.g. in Far Cry 2.
In particular AMD claims to offer the following performance improvements in the new driver version:
Besides, AMD says that AMD-based graphics cards may perform better if installed in PCs with AMD’s CPUs. I will not check out this claim in this review because most users stick to Intel’s platform and anyway I wouldn’t have been able to benchmark the driver with two graphics cards and on two platforms due to time constraints.
All graphics cards were benchmarked in a closed system case with the following configuration:
To minimize the platform’s influence on the performance of the tested graphics cards I overclocked the quad-core CPU to 4GHz at 1.525V voltage:
The system memory worked at 960MHz with 4-4-4-10 timings (PL=6) and 2.15V voltage.
The overclocked platform’s stability was verified by a half-an-hour run of OCCT version 3.1.0.
The graphics cards from Diamond Multimedia and HIS are copies of the reference cards:
|
|
|
|
The frequencies of the Diamond Radeon HD 4890 are pre-overclocked. The HIS Radeon HD 4870 X2 has the same frequencies as the reference card.
The tests were carried out under Windows 7 x64 RTM with the following drivers:
When I reinstalled a driver, I also cleaned the system from the remains of the previous version with Driver Sweeper 2.0.5. Once a driver had been installed, I made the following changes in its control panels: image quality changed from “Quality” to “High Quality”, Adaptive Antialiasing set to “Quality”, vertical synchronization set to “Always Off”. There were no other changes.
The graphics cards were tested in two resolutions: 1280x1024 and widescreen 1920x1200. The tests were performed in two image quality modes: “High Quality” without any image quality enhancements and “HQ+AF16x+AA4/8x” with 16x anisotropic filtering and 4x full screen antialiasing (or 8x FSAA if the average frame rate was high enough for comfortable gaming experience). I turned on full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering in the menu of each game. If the game didn’t provide such options, I enabled FSAA and AF from the Catalyst control panel.
The games were installed anew under the new OS and complemented with the latest patches available at the moment. A total of two synthetic benchmarks and 15 games of different genres were used:
Unfortunately, I could not launch The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena under Windows 7 x64 RTM although I tried two game distributions and installed the version 1.01 patch. Thus, I could not benchmark the two cards and two driver versions in that game.
If the game allows recording the bottom frame rate, the latter is also added to the charts. I performed two cycles of tests in each benchmark or game and wrote down the best of the two results if they differed less than 1%. If the difference was bigger, I performed another run of the test to check out the correctness of the result.
Synthetic benchmarks go first.
There is no difference in the performance of the Radeon HD 4890 with the two driver versions. With the Radeon HD 4870 X2, the difference can be observed at 1280x1024 only.
In the Performance profile of 3DMark Vantage the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is slower with Catalyst 9.8 than with Catalyst 9.7. The difference is smaller in the Extreme profile. The Radeon HD 4890 is indifferent to the change of the driver version.
Here, the new driver is no slower than the previous version 9.7. Moreover, the dual-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2 even has a performance boost at 1920x1200, including its bottom speed.
There is almost no difference between the new and old versions of the driver in this game except that you can see a small performance growth with Catalyst 9.8 at 1280x1024 when FSAA and AF are not enabled.
There are no performance benefits with any of the cards in Unreal Tournament 3. The negligible increase of speed of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in the low-quality image mode can hardly matter considering that the frame rates are as high as 200fps and more.
The Radeon HD 4890 accelerates in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky with the newer driver, especially at 1280x1024. Catalyst 9.7, being the first Catalyst for Windows 7, must have been not optimized well for that game. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 delivers the same performance irrespective of the driver version.
The bottom frame rate of the graphics cards grows up in certain modes in Crysis, but otherwise Catalyst 9.8 is no faster than the previous version.
The Far Cry 2 results are impressive: the dual-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2 is much faster with Catalyst 9.8 than with Catalyst 9.7. If we suppose that Catalyst 9.7 does not enable CrossFireX mode, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 would be slower than the overclocked Radeon HD 4890, but that’s not so. They have the same average frame rate. Thus, the developer must have corrected some bug in the driver, hence the impressive performance boost. And it is in Far Cry 2 that a 50% boost is actually promised in release notes. Unfortunately, there is no performance growth in the FSAA+AF mode.
The new driver speeds both cards up in Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor. The bottom speed of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 grows up by 47% at 1280x1024!
The new driver version doesn’t change anything in the performance of the two graphics cards in Left 4 Dead.
Save for the high-quality mode at 1920x1200 on the Radeon HD 4890, the new driver helps these graphics cards show better performance in the second scene of Lost Planet: Colonies than with Catalyst 9.7.
Catalyst 9.8 is good in this game, especially with the Radeon HD 4870 X2. Unfortunately, the game’s bug (the CrossFireX mode is disabled when the resolution is changed) persists even with the second patch. You have to leave the game and start it again to enable CrossFireX.
There is no difference between the two driver versions in this game.
Stormrise is the first and only game in this test session where the Radeon HD 4890 delivers somewhat better results with Catalyst 9.7 than with Catalyst 9.8. The Radeon HD 4870 X2, on the contrary, performs somewhat better with the newer driver.
The promised performance benefits can be observed in Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. as well. You can see them with both cards in every test mode. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is especially impressive.
Besides the fluctuations of the bottom speed on the Radeon HD 4870 X2, there is nothing we can see in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. The game does not support FSAA and is indifferent to the FSAA setting of the Catalyst driver.
The new benchmark of Resident Evil 5 does not differentiate between the two driver versions. Take note that the overclocked Radeon HD 4890 is about as fast as the dual-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2 in the third scene of the benchmark in the high-quality mode.
The results of my test session suggest that AMD/ATI programmers have done a good job to optimize the graphics card driver for the new OS (and not only for it because Windows Vista and Windows 7 share the same Catalyst driver pack). The Radeon HD 4890 and Radeon HD 4870 X2 perform faster with the newer driver than with Catalyst 9.7 in Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., Far Cry 2, and Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor. A smaller performance growth could also be observed in Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason, Lost Planet: Colonies, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. In the other games and benchmarks the two versions of the driver are equal to one another. The new version does not provoke a performance hit in any game, except for a minor reduction of speed in Stormrise. I noticed no image defects with the new version of the driver during my tests, so Catalyst 9.8 is undoubtedly a step forward and I recommend it for installation and use under Windows 7 and Vista.
