Introduction

A little earlier than the past two months, we see the release of the ATI Catalyst 6.8 drivers make an appearance from ATI, with some pretty interesting performance improvements on the table.

Following suit with out normal line up let's have a quick look at the release notes before we venture into the results.

Release Notes from ATI

As with most Catalyst releases, performance has increased in various situations.

Improved shader compiler and transform engine optimizations have led to many significant performance gains in OpenGL applications across the entire Radeon® X1000 series of products. These include:

Doom 3 performance improves as much as 6.5%

Quake 4 (v1.2 or higher) performance improves as much as 18%

Chronicles of Riddick performance improves as much as 20%. Average improvements of 5-10% are commonly seen

Prey performance improves as much as 16%

Optimizations made to ATI's graphics memory manager have led to significant gains in DirectX applications that make heavy use of graphics memory on 256MB ATI graphics cards:

3DMark06 performance improves as much as 22% on single ATI Radeon® X1000 series cards with 256MB of graphics memory at 1280x1024 and higher when anti-aliasing is enabled. The largest gains are found on the ATI Radeon® X1800 series and ATI Radeon® X1900 series of products

Call of Duty 2 performance improves as much as 30% on single ATI Radeon® X550 cards or higher with 256MB of video memory at 1280x1024 and higher when anti-aliasing enabled. The largest gains are found on the ATI Radeon® X1800 series and ATI Radeon® X1900 series of products

Editor Note - We made a careless HTML code error when we first published this article. It was using graph HTML code from our old Catalyst performance article. The problem has now been fixed!