Are you dutiful about keeping your drivers up-to-date? AMD does a pretty fantastic job about maintaining a monthly release schedule, after all. Today we look at how much performance you can expect from an old card in new games using four driver packages.
We update drivers for two reasons: stability and performance. When it comes to graphics, both are important, but it’s the latter we quantify using benchmarks.
Beyond making sure a game doesn’t crash, stability is difficult to measure. So, we make sure everything runs the way it should and move on.
On the other hand, performance is what built our industry. We want more frames per second. Sometimes, a performance boost necessitates an entirely new graphics card. But we’ve also seen examples of older boards picking up momentum thanks to focused driver development. If we can get extra speed via simple software updates, well, we’ll take it.
We’ll break down the evolution of an Nvidia-based card in our next installment of this series. For now, we’re tracking the performance of AMD’s vaunted Radeon HD 5870 over the course of its still-useful life.

The Radeon HD 5870 was released in mid-September 2009. So let’s assume you waited for at least a month to see what Nvidia was offering and ended up buying the 5870 in November. That means you've owned it for about a year and a half. Since that time, we've seen 15 driver updates.
| Driver | Date |
|---|---|
| Catalyst 11.2 | 2/15/11 |
| Catalyst 11.1 | 1/26/11 |
| Catalyst 10.12 | 12/13/10 |
| Catalyst 10.11 | 11/17/10 |
| Catalyst 10.10 | 10/22/10 |
| Catalyst 10.9 | 9/15/10 |
| Catalyst 10.8 | 8/25/10 |
| Catalyst 10.7 | 7/26/10 |
| Catalyst 10.6 | 6/16/10 |
| Catalyst 10.5 | 5/26/10 |
| Catalyst 10.4 | 4/28/10 |
| Catalyst 10.3 | 3/24/10 |
| Catalyst 10.2 | 2/17/10 |
| Catalyst 10.1 | 1/27/10 |
| Catalyst 9.12 | 12/17/09 |
| Catalyst 9.11 | 11/17/09 |
| Catalyst 9.10 | 10/22/09 |
After sinking close to $400 on that once flagship Radeon HD 5870, there is a good chance you've been updating its driver on a consistent basis. Each installation was probably preceded by the folllowing introduction in AMD's Catalyst release notes:
This article provides information on the latest posting of AMD’s software suite, AMD Catalyst 11.1. This particular software suite updates both the AMD display driver, and the AMD Catalyst Control Center. This unified driver has been updated to provide an enhanced level of power, performance, and reliability.
But have we really seen enhanced “power, performance, and reliability”? We are accustomed to seeing very small improvements in performance from one software update to the next. If every driver provides a performance bump, there should be a big difference between the first driver that supported the 5870 and the one AMD blogged about last month, right? Have those updates really been worthwhile? We are selecting four update packages from the original 15 to examine exactly what it means to keep your driver up-to-date.
- One Year Worth Of Drivers
- Test Hardware And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Lost Planet 2 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Aliens Vs. Predator (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: F1 2010 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Just Cause 2
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcarft: Cataclysm
- Final Words
Uninstall all drivers before installing new ones.
11.4 early preview still having the issue
from what i know the issue above mostly effect radeon 5000series (5850 and 5970)
for people having those issue forced to stick with 10.10e
still no news when amd will fix those issue, as from what i heard amd can't replicate the issue on their lab, thus can't fix it
This 6850 just doesn't feel as rock solid as the good old 4670, which never gave me any trouble. Here's hoping new drivers will solve my issues. Else, I might even switch to a pair of GeForces instead of getting another 6850 for crossfire.
Excellent story idea, assmar.
Not to say that Nvidia occasionally has driver issues, but at least they fix the problems. Only 10.9 and a couple versions before that don't give my 5870 any major problems.
Nice trolling man.
The conclusions I made (based on upgrades done after the hardware was about two years old) were that:
- Returns are diminishing as the hardware gets older.
The manufacturer will spend less time updating drivers for a three year old card than they do updating for the latest generation.
- Returns can even be negative when paired with older software.
It would have been very nice to see the test incorporate some of the benchmarks used to test the 5870 when it was released, to see if/how these have improved.
just kidding. the drivers game is the same for both camps. Nvidia is usualy more stable while AMD tries to improve often even at the cost of regresions.
the issue with the AMD driver schedule is that they alternate development teams. basicaly fixes from one driver release don't have to be included in the next, since the development started before the current one was finished. it's mostly visible on Linux drivers. One release fixes an issue and it's back in he next one.
That's because you were already working on it, weren't you?