New Catalyst 9.12 - Performance boosts on 58XX Series

[MrK6]

I'm seeing 47fps avg 2560x1600 4xx all enthusiast in Warhead, frost level.

Got a nice boost in framerates with my 5970 in Crysis over the Dirt 2 hotfix drivers, about 10%. I average around 45 FPS in the second level of Warhead at 2560x1600. It's silky smooth

http://relm.exophase.com/crysis/5970/Crysis64 2009-12-16 18-05-32-28.png
http://relm.exophase.com/crysis/5970/Crysis64 2009-12-16 18-05-49-01.png
http://relm.exophase.com/crysis/5970/Crysis64 2009-12-16 18-08-20-33.png

Holy crap . Looks like they got some of the scaling issues worked out. First time I think we've seen performance like this come out of ANY hardware setup. I've got to try these on my single 5870 and see if there's as big a difference.

 

[Hyperlite]

free download manager FTW

 

[Grooveriding]

Anyone with any 5970 crossfire benches on these or links to some ?

 

[Gikaseixas]

can't wait to get home tonight, will report back soon, damn this is amazing work by the drivers team at ATI.

 

[mikimaru]

Thnx, downloading the driver now.

For XP, the link is :

http://markholmes.sapphiretech.com/Drivers/Catalyst/9_12/catalyst_9.12_windows_xp_dec14.zip

 

[yacoub]

Cool, hopefully official links soon, and maybe an Anandtech review?

 

[Lonyo]

Cool, hopefully official links soon, and maybe an Anandtech review?

AT unfortunately doesn't often do driver update reviews, but maybe this time they will.

Xbitlabs is usually pretty good for doing retests with new drivers, so hopefully they might do something.

 

[akugami]

AT unfortunately doesn't often do driver update reviews, but maybe this time they will.

Xbitlabs is usually pretty good for doing retests with new drivers, so hopefully they might do something.

I'm not a fan of retesting new drivers, especially with the almost regular monthly schedule of ATI's driver releases. But in this case I think Anandtech should do a retest. I've always felt looking at the numbers that there was more performance to be had from the Radeon 5xxx series and that immature drivers were holding it back and to a degree. Preliminary buzz seems to be that these drivers improve performance but I'd love to see what it does in a full battery of tests.

 

[Rafael]

I heard that ATi enabled directcompute on this driver on dx10 cards.
Can anyone confirm that?
Can't wait to get home and check that!

TIA!

 

[SunnyD]

All I care about is whether or not they've released their OpenCL stack with this one yet.

 

[Lonyo]

I'm not a fan of retesting new drivers, especially with the almost regular monthly schedule of ATI's driver releases. But in this case I think Anandtech should do a retest. I've always felt looking at the numbers that there was more performance to be had from the Radeon 5xxx series and that immature drivers were holding it back and to a degree. Preliminary buzz seems to be that these drivers improve performance but I'd love to see what it does in a full battery of tests.

Xbitlabs does every month or two (usually) and a handful of games, less than half a dozen, over a few cards (including Crossfire).
It's quite nice to get an indication of changes, and especially if the drivers claim specific speedups, to test them out.

With the HD57xx cards it really is quite important to retest with updated drivers, because conclusions were made that they don't offer a reasonable alternative to the HD48xx cards, and with driver speedups that conclusion could change.
For the HD58xx cards it's not such a major issue, they are already the fastest single cards, but again for Crossfire (HD5970 and crossfired anything) it could have a more significant impact.

 

[zagood]

An increase like this via driver update is impossible. Everyone knows they're bandwidth limited *sigh*

 

[akugami]

Thing is most of the time drivers only give minor bumps in performance (assuming there wasn't a bug hindering performance) and are mostly bug fixes.

Decent sized boosts in performance from drivers could lessen any potential gap between Fermi and the Radeon 5xxx series. So this could have a significant impact.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Thing is most of the time drivers only give minor bumps in performance (assuming there wasn't a bug hindering performance) and are mostly bug fixes.

Decent sized boosts in performance from drivers could lessen any potential gap between Fermi and the Radeon 5xxx series. So this could have a significant impact.

Sandbagging?

 

[Shilohen]

I would rather see AT wait until Fermi is there and actually test the latest ATI/AMD driver then (might even get a new boost). Right now, we know the performance of the 58xx is good enough anyway. Even if the new driver is stellar, I don't see that many gain for a new review from a consumer's "what to buy" point of view. I didn't check the 57xx performance enough to know if that segment would warrant a new review right away though.

 

[akugami]

Sandbagging?

Nah, I think because of the new architecture of the new Radeon 5xxx series that ATI was stretched thin and couldn't properly tune the new drivers. Keep in mind that while ATI has a regular driver release cycle that they do not have the resources to devote to drivers that nVidia does due to financial reasons.

 

[coreyb]

I'd rather see the many driver issues fixed rather then performance increases.

 

[Grooveriding]

The largest performance gains with this driver set are in crossfire configs.

 

[Meghan54]

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATICatalyst912Hotfix.aspx


9.12 Hotfix....addresses some Crossfire issues.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Would this improve the performance on my 4830 at all?

I'm all for more performance.

 

[Grinja]

I'd rather see the many driver issues fixed rather then performance increases.

I wonder if this has sorted the cut scene issue when AA is enabled running DX 10 mode.

 

[evolucion8]

You mean in Resident Evil 5 right? As of currently, the HD 3870 still having that issue with the latest official 9.12 cats. My sister had to disable Anti Aliasing to be able to see the cutscenes. Pity.

 

[Grinja]

You mean in Resident Evil 5 right? As of currently, the HD 3870 still having that issue with the latest official 9.12 cats. My sister had to disable Anti Aliasing to be able to see the cutscenes. Pity.

I was holding off playing RE5 in the hopes it would be fixed. Both my 4870 and 5850 still have the issue running Cat 9.12.

Oh well may as well play it without AA, still looks pretty good.

 

[Painman]

I simply wish for an update to CCC that will allow per-game settings for AA/AF the same as nVCPL does. ATi is still stuck in the stone age AFAIC on this score.

Or at least get Global Settings to actually work. Because they don't. If I force AA/AF, then my FO3 looks like deep fried dog poo.

I LOVE my 5850's performance, but I HATE CCC right now. I shouldn't have to rely on Ray Adams for something that nV gives its card owners already.