New ATI Catalyst Drivers are out!

And we've benchmarked the cards we used in the current issue of the mag. There's some odd behaviour here...

The newest 8.8 drivers for the Radeons have just been released over at AMD’s site.

We’ve had them for the last day and a bit, and we’ve been making the same crossfire-d and single configuration 4870 and 4850 cards jump through the same hoops we made them jump through in the current issue of Atomic that pits them against Nvidia’s best. Only they were being powered by Catalyst 8.7 back then.

When we got our hands on an early release of Catalyst 8.8, we assumed we’d see better performance and could say that they became incrementally better than the magazine had stated.

But we think we might be doing it wrong.

What to make of Catalyst 8.8? Odd things really. It returns worse results than 8.7 most of the time, and simply didn’t want to play with a pair of Crossfire-d 4850. It’s unusual, and perplexing.

Here’s the results:



Yeah. Check out those Crysis results.

Something’s clearly wrong here. We’re going to have a chat to AMD about this and find out what’s in the changelog and if we were testing a buggy beta driver by mistake and scrounge around for any more info we can find.

Stick around these parts and we’ll post an update when we know more and have more benchmarking goodness for you.

For what it’s worth, all the cards run a bloody sight cooler and quieter under Catalyst 8.8 than they did under Catalyst 8.7.