Do New Drivers Really Boost Performance?

Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire: Driver Update From 8.6 to 8.8

If you believe the conjecture, the Catalyst 8.8 driver should introduce a considerable performance improvement in CrossFire mode. Particularly when it comes to communication between two graphics cards, ATI is able to optimize in many games.

The new graphics driver doesn’t appear to increase the frame rates.

The fluctuations are a little more extreme, but they’re in the tolerance region for driver optimizations.

Again, we aren’t seeing any appreciable gain after updating to the Catalyst 8.8 driver set. In fact, these losses are generally with a reasonable margin of error.

The new graphics driver sinks the frame rates in Very High setting and in some of the higher resolutions by six percent to 11 percent.

The use of the Catalyst 8.7 instead of the Catalyst 8.8 unfortunately meant using different graphics drivers in this test versus the others, which you wouldn’t typically do in the real world. As a result, the considerable performance gain of up to 20 percent is interesting to observe, though it’s still a shame we weren’t able to provide comparative numbers for 8.8.

Half-Life 2 Episode 2 displays no performance increase due to the driver update.

The results lie within the measurement tolerance; no improvement can be seen.

Here, again, there are no improvement or losses worth mentioning; the values lie within the margin for error.

The driver update generates a minor loss in performance, apart from the -6.5 percent in the 1280 resolution (4xAA); other fluctuations can be considered measuring tolerances.