AMD Radeon HD 7970: Benchmarks of different versions of Catalyst drivers

We will show the performance improvement from the first Catalyst 11.12 until the last Catalyst Catalyst 11.12 12.7 BETA.
Recently AMD introduced the AMD Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Edition, an enhanced version with the Tahiti XT2 core of the HD 7970. Let’s see the performance of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 but not compared with its rival Nvidia, in this case we will benchmark the different versions of Catalyst drivers, both WQHL and BETA that have been released by AMD.

Currently AMD Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Edition has positioned itself as the most powerful monoGPU graphics card on the market, beating the HD 7970 and GTX 680 from Nvidia. The guys at OCaholic have done an interesting performance analysis offered by the HD 7970 but with different Catalyst driver versions, particularly with nine different versions.

The system used for benchmarks for this comparison consists of an ASUS P8P67 Pro, an Intel Core i7 2600K, G.Skill RAM 4x4GB CL9 Dual Channel RipjawsZ-9-9-24-DDR3-1600 MHz, a Samsung SSD 830 Series 128 GB, Seasonic power supply SS-Platinum 1000XP and of course a Radeon HD 7970, specifically the XFX dual fan model.

The AMD Catalyst driver versions that have been bench-marked were as follows.

• Catalyst 11.12 (8.921.0.0) (02/12/2011) (Retail)
• Catalyst RC11 11.12 (8.921.2) (19/12/2011)
• Catalyst WHQL 11.12 (8.921.5) (29/12/2011)
• Catalyst 12.2 (8.950.0) (14/02/2012)
• Catalyst 3.12 WHQL (8.951.0) (08/03/2012)
• Catalyst 4.12 WHQL (8.961.0) (05/04/2012)
• Catalyst 12.6 (8.980.0) (Beta 06.04.2012)
• Catalyst 12.x (9.000.0) (Beta 06.12.2012)
• Catalyst 12.7 (8.981.2) (Beta 06.12.2012)

Let’s see the results of benchmarking some of the major games on the market and synthetic benchmarks. Because the images are large and seem cut out, just click on them to see them full size, sorry for the inconvenience.

3DMark 11.

3DMark Vantage.

Unigine Heaven.

TessMark.

Alien VS Predator.

Batman: Arkham City.

DIRT 2.

Call Of Duty MW3.

Battlefield 3.

Crysis 2.

Dragon Age 2.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

StarCarft 2.

As can be seen, from the first controllers to the last there is an improvement in the performance of the HD 7970 and in some cases the improvement is sometimes quite important. Also improves the synthetic test scores. Lets now continue with the consumption benchmarks of the HD 7970 with all the Catalyst drivers available.
Consumption at rest.

Consumption on load.

Consumption is also improved but little, because only 2W at idle and 5W at load from the first drivers to the latest.

Improved synthetic test.

The improvement in synthetic tests from the first Catalyst 11.12 drivers until the last Catalyst 12.7 BETA is about 46.27%, a very good number.
Improved games.

In games, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 equipped with the latest Catalyst 7.12 BETA showed an improvement in performance of 23.13% compared to Catalyst 11.12, this is also a good number to consider.
Overall improvement.

The conclusion we can draw from all this is that the AMD Radeon HD 7970 has improved its performance by 29.74% in general terms since it has gone on sale, and we think this is a great figure, which shows the great work he has done by AMD in its Catalyst drivers, something we have not seen in the past.

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