Far Cry, UT 2004, Xpand Rally
After taking a look around for improvements that have been pointed out by ATI, we can now take a look through our own set of HEXUS benchmarking titles to see if there are any other noteworthy improvements. All of these benchmarks will be run at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, first without AA and AF and then with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. Of course, it isn't really worth showing graphs when there has been no change, so let me first mention the two titles which showed no performance changes, either good or bad: Far Cry, and Unreal Tournament 2004 - Two titles which have no doubt already been looked at in-depth by ATI since its release. Thus Far Cry's custom 'Research' timedemo showed nothing noteworthy whatsoever, performance is as good as it always has been. UT 2004 on the other hand has always been heavily CPU limited on current high-end boards, hence the lack of any changes there.Next in line Xpand Rally, using our own custom recorded replay, played back using FRAPS.
No massive differences without AA or AF, however you can see a consistent yet small performance improvement in performance when using CATALYST 4.12 - Possibly another result of driver efficiency improvements?
There's much more to see with 4x AA and 8x AF enabled - We can see that CATALYST 4.11 improved performance over its predecessor quite substantially, and CATALYST 4.12 has gleaned a little more performance still from this title. Thankfully, the new driver also sees what seems to be a bug fix - Using CATALYST 4.11, running at 1280x1024 saw it impossible to use anisotropic filtering at that resolution for some reason, hence the disproportionate performance you can see on the chart above. If AF was select at those settings with CATALYST 4.11, only trilinear filtering was used, but this has clearly been fixed in the new driver, resulting in much improved image quality at this setting.
