Is Catalyst 11.6 Cheating?

[nameon]

My specs

AMD Phenom II X4 970 BE Quad Core Processor @ 3.51Ghz
Asus Republic of Gamers Crosshair IV Formula Motherboard
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB DDR5 (shorter, non-dual bios switch, unflashable one) (overclocked to Official limit 840-1325)
Corsair XMS 3 DDR3 4GB Ram Kit (2x2GB) @ 1333Mhz (TW3X4G1333C9DHX)
A Dell E176Fp Monitor @ 1280x1024 @ 60Hz (Dont Laugh at me)
A-Power AK850 850w PSU
Xigmatek Gaia SD1283 CPU Cooler
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
And i use a very old P/S 2 Keyboard ( yes from a dell dimension 3000) but still Kicking ASS

So you now know my specs

i have a question about The new catalyst 11.6 Driver?

You see i was AMAZED after seeing how much the performance inscreased with the new driver in unigine heaven 2.5
The score went from 1176 in cat 11.5b (with tessalation normal, AA@x4, AF@x8) to 1267 (at the same settings) in cat 11.6.

This was obviously a huge increase in performance right, but then while treading carefully through the rough waves of the internet i came across one forum post that brought me back to earth. This everso negative forum post might have had some truth to it.

The Guy said that the performance increase was so high only because the 11.6 radeon drivers told the GPU to render at LOWER settings even if you set it to high (or rendered less)

IS this true? to my understanding the only way we can put this beast of a rumor to rest is if we take to screenshots of exactly the same frame but rendered using the two different drivers (11.5b vs 11.6), unfortunately i simply do not have the time or resources to do such a task, this is where i ask a favor from the tomshardware community, could you please do this experiment for the sake of all who hear this dreadful but maybe true rumor. Thanx in Advance

PS- I live in East Africa and no not in Kenya.

 

[Gulli]

It's possible AMD is cheating Unigine, just like Nvidia did when releasing benchmarks for their GT 4xx series. That's why I never look at synthetic benchmarks, though something like 3DMark is much more diverse and therefore much more reliable than Unigine.

 

[nameon]

But i really need a side by side comaprison of quality between the two drivers,
if you done the comparison and their the same quality then this theory is wrong
but if you do se a quality difference (i.e - the 11.6 shot is less quality) then this theory would have some truth could someone please do this and post results

 

[mactronix]

I would think its just someone rehashing an issue that came to light a little while ago, FP16 Demotion is what its called if you fancy looking it up to see if its what the post was on about.

Mactronix