ATI Catalyst 10.3a Driver Performance Benchmarking
Late yesterday we got word that ATI would be coming out with a Catalyst 10.3 preview update driver that would increase the performance of more than a dozen PC games. We don't think it's a coincidence that this driver just happens to come out the week before the GeForce GTX 480 graphics card is due to launch at PAX East. Read on to see how Catalyst 10.3 drivers do in the benchmarks when we compare them to Catalyst 10.2 drivers on a Radeon HD 5870 graphics card!
After spending less than a day with the ATI Catalyst 10.3a drivers, it appears that they bring better performance to the majority of PC game titles that we tried them on. The only game title that we didn't see a performance improvement on was Batman: Arkham Asylum, but the performance hit wasn't even significant. In the other games that we benchmarked we got a small boost in performance, with the best performance gain seen coming from Tom Clancy's Hawx. Having a 19% performance gain in a game title from a driver update is amazing and something great to see. Speaking of sight, we also didn't notice any image quality differences, so it looks like ATI isn't cheating on the image quality to get better performances...
Have you tried 10.3a yet? If so and you still have problems how about disabling Crossfire until ATI releases the updated driver as quoted in the article? " During our conversation with AMD this morning, we also got a heads up that in the next few days an ATI Crossfire profile update is in the works for Battlefield2: Bad Company that will increase performance by up to 75%! "
This will likely remedy your stuttering issues.
