Hardware News

ATI Catalyst 9.2 Performance Analysis

Patrick "MACMAC" MacMillan

2009-02-27 12:16:25.0


TweakTown and X-bit Labs have posted a performance analysis of the new ATI Catalyst 9.2 graphics drivers.

Here's what they had to say:

  • TweakTown:

    "This driver set is a bit all over the place. For the most part performance seems to be up, which is always a good thing. The particularly good news is that there are performance improvements seen in the more important minimum department. This is where we want to see the increases which hopefully help in going above that golden 30 FPS minimum we always like to see.

    But as we mentioned in our test system setup comments, the performance gains were promised under CPU-limited applications. Since this isn't really an issue for us, the gains were probably not as great as they would have been if we did have this problem."


    Click here to read the full review.


  • X-bit Labs:

    "First of all, they didn’t deliver on the promise of 20% performance gain in Crysis Warhead. The owners of dual-GPU graphics cards have got 2-3% improvement at best, while single-chip Radeon HD even slowed down quite noticeably. The second game mentioned in the release notes for the new Catalyst 9.2 driver, World in Conflict, the actual gain turned out higher than had been promised and reached up to 12% depending o the screen resolution. Unfortunately, it was again valid only for dual-processor Radeon HD models: 4870 X2 and 4850 X2.

    Other benchmarks results confirmed our suppositions about ATI driver developers focusing their efforts on optimizing the dual-GPU solutions performance in the first place and adding software CrossFireX support for the new games. The results obtained in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin are excellent proof of that. ATI’s desire to provide fully-functional CrossFireX support is definitely a great thing; however, we find this approach to driver development a little one-sided. Moreover, contemporary multi-GPU concept once again showed that extreme dependence on the software support is in fact its major weakness."


    Click here to read the full review.

These new drivers are mostly optimized for multi-GPU configurations, and there are impressive gains in many of the popular newer games.

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