Has any tech site already run those drivers trough test suite? I've got a suspicion that these are another drivers that ever so slightly lower performance on 5 series. If they can improve performance on 6 series(VLIV5) why on earth can't they do the same for 5 series. Those two series share the same VLIV5 underlying architecture. At the very least they should try not to lower performance on the older cards. I hate planned obsolesce.
Because no one really cares about the 5 series... 6th seriesis here and series 7 is already on the horizon...
I still have a 4th series card in my 2nd comp, so not flaming, just stating reality.
That's not true, as of now far more people have 5 series radeons than the "new" 68XX VLIW5 GPUs. Only VLIW4 is a really new design. The whole situation just reeks of planned obsolescence. The sad thing is that their competitor has even worse business practices.
I personally don't understand the perceived need for new drivers every month. It's nice that AMD offers this (They actually offer more than that, but it's one certified driver per month.), and if there's a particular performance issue that gets fixed, then great. If your equipment is working fine though and the next drivers don't have anything to offer for you, what's the drama? If I install a new driver that breaks something, I roll back to the previous driver, and do a bug ticket. Wait for the next one and if it's still there tell them again. In the meantime, if I have to use the same driver for 3mos. no big deal really.
Mostly because game developers suck at writing code to a standard, and next month's games tend to have an alarmingly high probability of not working properly with an unhappily high percentage of graphics chips.
So does the official 11.5 have everything 11.5a hotfix have?
I just want to know which one offers best performance?
I have a 6850 with Jan 4th 2011 drivers... doesnt say which version, im guessing i need to update
Has any tech site already run those drivers trough test suite? I've got a suspicion that these are another drivers that ever so slightly lower performance on 5 series. If they can improve performance on 6 series(VLIV5) why on earth can't they do the same for 5 series. Those two series share the same VLIV5 underlying architecture. At the very least they should try not to lower performance on the older cards. I hate planned obsolesce.
I doubt AMD, or anyone else, has the resources to pour into performance enhancements for product that is EOL. It's a lot of work keeping the current product operating at it's peak.
As for the claim that was put forth that they actually sabotage their older equipment with inferior performance on newer driver releases to accelerate it's obsolescence, we'd need some proof of that. They'll sometimes have driver releases that reduce performance a bit on their current models as well. I'm assuming it's for the good of the overall performance and bug squashing.
Hmm. Got a new 5770 today, but the 11.5 drivers refused to play nice with it. Gave me a couple blue screen crashes. The 11.4 drivers strangely would not appear for download, so I ended up downloading and installing the 11.3 drivers, which have worked fine so far.
Here's TweakTown's analysis of 11.5: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/4081/amd_catalyst_11_5_windows_7_driver_analysis/index1.html.
Looks like the strange upset win from last month, in which the 6870 somehow mysteriously surpassed the 5870 in most tests, has been righted. The 6870 is down, the 5870 is up. Cough it up to testing error or perhaps optimizations that were backed out. Who knows...obviously neither should be losing performance, but when the 6870 gained and the 5870 lost big last month, it was suspicious.