AMD Catalyst 11.6 Driver Analysis

Final ThoughtsOverall the 11.6 drivers were destined for great things in terms of performance increases and the games listed in the release nots should be seeing the performance increases straight away. Unigine benchmarks were said to give up to 10% increased performance and we saw just that, so we can only assume the likes of Crysis, F1 2010, Far Cry 2 and HAWX will see this boost too.

We tested the drivers with our usual plethora of gaming benchmarks and whilst we saw some slight increased performance in some, we saw a decrease in others. 3DMark Vantage is a prime example of this, and we can only hope that AMD address this issue in conjunction with Futuremark so that user benchmark results are not affected long-term.

We could have run these tests on several graphics cards, but with the price of cards being more competitive than ever, we’re seeing more and more users welding 6900 series cards. For us to appeal to you, we showed exactly what results we got with our 6950 graphics card.

The drivers have been out for a couple of days now and from the feedback we’ve received, we are hearing good things about the improved performance increases and stability across multiple ranges of graphics cards and multiple operating system platforms.

Whether you update to the latest 11.6 drive is of course a personal choice of your own, but barring the 3DMark Vantage tests, we can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t as you will see improved stability and increased performance on a variety of games, applications and benchmarks on various platforms including Windows XP, Vista and of course Windows 7.