AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 8 - HD 7970 Gaming Performance

Published by Christian Ney on 29.11.12
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Conclusion

With the Catalyst 12.11 Beta 8 we have added another driver to our graphic where we list the performance and power consumption of all the latest AMD drivers. Basically the Catalyst 12.11 Beta 8 is fighting with the Catalyst 12.11 Beta 4 for the performance crown and furthermore AMD has solved the issue regarding idle power consumption.

A closer look at the benchmark results shows, that performance wise there are almost no changes at all. In one benchmark the 12.11 Beta 8 is one percent ahead and in the other the 12.11 Beta 4 is one percent faster. In the end that is what we can also see from our performance rating. Overall AMD's latest 12.11 Beta 8 driver is a tiny bit more than 0.5 percent slower than their Beta 4 driver. If you start searching bigger differences, then you will find them with Battlefield III, Skyrim and StarCraft II. In case of Battlefield III the Beta 8 driver is about 3 percent faster than Beta 4, for Skyrim the Beta 4 driver is almost 8 percent faster than Beta 8 and under StarCraft II Beta 8 is a bit more than 3 percent behind Beta 4.

So really, the performance differences are no big deal, but these new drivers aren't really about performance. In fact there was a bug related to the C-states, which was almost doubling the power consumption of our testsystem when it was in idle. The problem was that the GPU didn't go in it's lowest P-state, meaning that the clock speed remained on a much higher frequency than usual. With their latest Beta 8 driver AMD took care of this issue and power consumption is back to normal at 65 Watts.



Author: Christian Ney c.ney@ocaholic.ch


Page 1 - Introduction Page 8 - Crysis 2 / Dragon Age 2
Page 2 - Test Setup & Specifications Page 9 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. / The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim / StarCraft 2
Page 3 - Benchmarks and Games Settings Page 10 - Power Consumption
Page 4 - 3D Mark 11 / 3D Mark Vantage Page 11 - Summary Benchmark Results
Page 5 - Unigine Heaven / TessMark Page 12 - Performance Index
Page 6 - Alien vs. Predator / Batman: Arkham City / Dirt 2 Page 13 - Conclusion
Page 7 - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 / BattleField 3



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AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 8 - HD 7970 Gaming Performance - Graphics cards > Drivers > ATI/AMD - Reviews - ocaholic