Yesterday, we introduced readers to AMD's new 'Never Settle' Christmas marketing campaign, where, aside from revealing the firm's extra-competitive gaming bundle deals, we previewed the new Catalyst 12.11 driver, which showed a marked performance increase in GCN 7xxx Radeon HD hardware at no extra cost, be it in terms of price or power consumption.
Our tests, between the Radeon HD 7970 GE and the GeForce GTX 680 concluded that in scenarios where NVIDIA was king, the 12.11 drivers enabled the AMD card to marginally close the performance gap, whilst in games where AMD was already on-top, the latest drivers saw the Radeon card blaze ahead even further, with up to a 19.4 per cent performance increase witnessed.
AMD has has now released these competitive new beta drivers to the gaming public and you can obtain your copy at the following link:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst1211betadriver.aspx
AMD is quoting the following performance highlights for all GCN-based graphics cards:
- 10%-15% more performance in Battlefield 3 in most cases
- More than 20% in certain missions and sequences (Comrades)
- Up to 7% more performance in Metro 2033
- Up to 10% more performance in DIRT Showdown
- Up to 8% more performance in Sleeping Dogs
- Up to 12% more performance in Civilization V
- Up to 10% more performance in StarCraft II
- Up to 8% more performance in Sniper Elite: V2
