[H]ard|OCP has posted a review of the performance of the Catalyst 10.3a drivers. Basically they show that there was some performance gains in all the games. Personally, I think that the driver release is an attempt to spoil the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 and 470 launch. The rumor is that these two Nvidia cards perform only 5% to 10% better than similar ATI cards. If that is so, then the following statement from the article is particularly poignant.
We generally saw performance improvements in every game we tested; there is no question about that. AMD should be commended for staying vigilant on improving performance in games. We know these guys work hard at it. However, it does have to be said that most of these improvements don’t add up to changing the gameplay experience. Anything under a 10% performance improvement can pretty much be written off in gamer’s eyes. To gamers, these small increases in performance are meaningless if they don’t let you enable an extra in-game option or raise graphics settings.
via Catalyst Performance – AMD’s ATI Catalyst 10.3a Driver Performance | [H]ard|OCP.
