Introduction

Running a little late again we have a good excuse this month with some test bed changes so we mixed the comparison graphics cards up again and we have introduced Windows Vista testing for the first time. This allows us to introduce DX10 testing and we feel now is a good time since there is a good selection of DX10 games out.

Let's have a quick look at the performance improvements and move straight onto the benchmarks.

Performance Improvements

Far Cry performance improves up to 14 % on the ATI Radeon™ HD2900XT CrossFire™, ATI Radeon™ HD2600XT single card, and ATI Radeon™ HD2400XT CrossFire™ configurations

Call of Duty 2 performance improves as much as 12% with Anti-Aliasing enabled on the ATI Radeon™ HD2600XT CrossFire™ and single card configurations

Half-Life 2: Episode 1 performance improves at most 9% on ATI Radeon™ HD2600XT CrossFire™ and as much as 6% on the ATI Radeon™ HD2400XT CrossFire™ configurations.

Serious Sam 2 performance improves up to 46% on the ATI Radeon™ HD2400XT CrossFire™ and up to 27% on the ATI Radeon™ HD2600XT single card and CrossFire™ configurations with Anti-Aliasing enabled.

Quake 4 performance with Anti-Aliasing improves 9% or more on the ATI Radeon™ X1600/X1650Pro and ATI Radeon™ X1300/X1550 products in both single and CrossFire™ configurations

Performance Improvements Note

We receive the Catalyst drivers before they go up on the AMD website and before the release notes are written. While we don't always get the opportunity to test the particular applications that are mentioned in the release notes we try to cover all our bases by testing Synthetic, Real World, HDR, OpenGL, Direct3D along with AA and AF.

If there is an application improvement that we haven't tested feel free to use the forums and comment on anything you notice.

Moving on...