Benchmark Results: Synthetics
3DMark 11
When you see some of these cards show up twice, remember that we're testing the AMD board with two driver versions. The Catalyst 12.11 beta package propels performance forward quite a bit (in some cases well beyond Nvidia's results). We didn’t think that new drivers would make this much of a difference (again), but AMD manages to give its cards a very welcome boost. We're looking into what the company did to achieve its speed-up.
Unigine Heaven 2.5
Clearly, AMD put a lot of effort into optimizing the Catalyst 12.11 driver for synthetic benchmark performance. But do actual games benefit just as much from the company's tuning?
We didn’t bother with Catalyst 12.9 in Unigine, but we did include a triple-monitor setup.
Unigine Sanctuary
We’re only using the Catalyst 12.11 beta build in this benchmark as well. The average frame rate increase moving from Catalyst 12.9 to 12.11 is only about five percent, anyway.
