So what do we make of that lot? Well overall it's hard not to be a little underwhelmed. There are aspects where initially it looks like progress has been made, Battlefield 3 for example where the 13.8 driver ends its run better than the 13.6 but the new version is a little worse to begin with. We must bear in mind though that Battlefield 3 has a pretty low latency anyway so it's not a huge issue. Where we would have liked to see an improvement is Metro: Last Light but sadly framerates decreased and we saw larger spikes in frametimes on 13.8 which was disappointing. Really though one of the key titles which needs frametime improvements is Crysis 3 (on NVIDIA and AMD hardware) but that remains pretty much the same on the new 13.8 driver which is a shame as in this game the micro stutters are very noticable to the naked eye.
Overall we have to say this release doesn't deliver what we would have expected and to be honest we are not sure why AMD has rushed to deliver it in a state where there are no significant real world improvements in key titles... or why they felt waiting until all resolutions and DX9/OpenGL were ready wasnt worthwhile. It could be that there is an improvement in tests which use FCAT technology to record driver improvements but until the gains are replicated in real world use for games such as Crysis 3 we see no reason to change our conclusions from recent reviews.