ATI CATALYST 6.8 Performance Report - Page 1 - Introduction and Test Setup

After taking a brief hiatus since our last ATI CATALYST report, we are back today with a brand new driver performance report under our belt.

This time around, we've assembled a brand-new enthusiast-oriented system, and re-benchmarked CATALYST version 6.4, as well as 6.7 and the new 6.8 pre-release. The release notes from ATI accompanying this driver look as follows:

Added optimizations to our graphics memory manager that benefit cards with large local frame buffers and provides performance improvements of up to 30% in 3D Mark 2006 and Call of Duty 2 when anti-aliasing is used.

Overall Notes (5% improvement or greater)

OpenGL game performance improves as much as 6.5% in Doom 3 and up to 18% in Quake 4 v1.2 or higher.

Chronicles of Riddick performance improves as much as 20%. Average improvements of 5-10% are commonly seen.

Prey performance improves as much as 16%.

Performance improvements of up to 30% on Radeon X550 cards or higher with 256MB of video memory in single card configurations can be had in applications that make heavy use of the frame buffer, such as 3D Mark 2006 and Call of Duty 2 with anti-aliasing enabled and resolutions set to 1280x1024 or greater.

It would appear that the focus of this release has been on OpenGL optimizations, as well as better management of graphics memory on cards with larger frame buffers. Prey and Chronicles of Riddick did not make the short benchmark list, but armed with an X1900 XT, we'll see which of these other performance claims hold true. Our complete test setup is as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 processor @ 9 * 333 MHz (3.0 GHz)
ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard (Intel P965 chipset)
2 * 1024 MB Corsair XMS PC2-8500 memory @ DDR2-1000, 5-5-5-15/2T
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512 MB video card

As you can see, this system is equipped with some serious hardware -- in other words, it's an awesome candidate for evaluating the minute performance differences that can come with graphics driver updates! Read on to see what our testing revealed.

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