AMD Catalyst 11.7 Driver Analysis

Final ThoughtsTaking a look at the release notes tells us that 11.7 has a lot of bug fixes and improvements in terms of video playback, HD capabilities and general video aspects. When it comes to gaming it doesn’t really dwell much on it as this driver release wasn’t aimed at improving performance in games.

Moving to our results, it seems that is the truth as a lot of the benchmarks we ran saw no improvement at all. There is of course an exception with Batman, which saw a noticeable gain in FPS but nothing visually outstanding due to the high frame-rate used already.

There was an odd moment in a couple of areas where we saw a performance hit and in fact a decrease in performance, and we can only hope that 11.8 will rectify this issue.

From our initial findings it does seem that 11.8 is a slightly more important release with gamers in mind, much like 11.6 was. If you remember and cast your minds back, 11.6 saw a lot of good performance increases, whereas it seems 11.7 has been more focussed on video playback. Maybe AMD have a system of releasing ever other version aimed at gaming performance, whilst the releases in between take care of video playback and issues. Only AMD know the answer behind that one.

The long and short of it, is that if you are a gamer with no real issues, 11.6 is your safest bet, as by upgrading you may find that you lose performance. If video playback is your bag, then we’d certainly advise you to upgrade if you have issues, but a philosphy I’ve always lived by is “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” so I can hopefully pass that message on to you and you can make an educated decision about AMD Catalyst 11.7 drivers.