After the last great driver release from ATI that included many nice features, I was quite curious to see if the next release was going to show any considerable performance increases. Judging from the release notes, the main features have been aimed at resolving issues with software. This makes sense, as ATI has just released a big update in regards to features with the Catalyst 5.13's.

For a complete list of software fixes from the release notes, see the news article posted today.

The Release Notes don't specifically mention any performance improvements, but usually there is some improvement from revision to revision, so, using ATI X1800 XT in a crossfire setup, we ran the new driver version side by side with the last release on some of our benchmarks to see whether we could find performance differences, if any. This is a very brief look but hopefully it will yield some interesting results.

Test Setup

For our tests we used the same setup that we had used when we took a look at the 5.13 Catalysts. The test setup is as follows:

DFI LanParty RDX200 CF-DR Motherboard
AMD 64 3700+ @ 2.7GHz
1024MB OCZ PC4800 RAM
X1800 XT Crossfire
Windows XP SP2
Catalyst 6.1 Driver Suite

Benchmark Results

3DMark2005

We see a definite performance boost in Fill Rate with the new drivers.

Pixel Shader performance is not improved.

As with the Pixel Shader, Vertex Shader performance has not been improved either.

Doom 3

Doom 3 shows a performance boost, both with and without advanced effects.

Far Cry

Far Cry shows some definite improvement over the 5.13's.

Call of Duty 2

Call of Duty 2 has shown no improvement

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

No improvement have been seen with SM 3.0.

Conclusion:

So after testing the two revisions side by side, we can see that there were some nice overall performance boosts with the new drivers. Doom 3 and Far Cry showed a noticeable increase in FPS, which will help ATI considerably in the Open GL market. Fill Rate has also increased, as shown by the results in 3DMark 05. Pixel and Vertex Shaders had no increase in performance. Call of Duty 2 has shown no improvements and showed the same results as the 5.13 drivers. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory has had no improvements using SM 3.0 and turned out identical results as with the 5.13's. Overall I have to say that I am impressed with the improvements that the drivers have shown in certain games. While not showing any new features, the latest catalysts have shown that they are a worthy step from the 5.13's. In defense of ATI, the 5.13's were quite impressive and with the performance improvements shown with the 6.1's, ATI has given us quite a bit to be happy about.