Legit Reviews

AMD Never Settle Game Bundle & Catalyst 12.11 Driver Performance

Today, AMD is making two big announcements. First, they are announcing some very impressive game bundles for those that are looking to buy a Radeon HD graphics card this fall and holiday shopping season. Secondly, they are announcing 'The Never Settle Driver' (Catalyst 12.11) that offers significant performance improvements in pretty much every game and benchmark available. Read on to find out more about both!

If you purchase an AMD Radeon HD 7970 or 7950 graphics card you'll get three game titles; Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3, and Hitman: Absolution. You also get a 20% discount code valid through EA's Origin site. This is the crème de la crème when it comes to the Never Settle game bundles and is valued at ~$170 when you figure in the full MSRP of the game titles and discount voucher value. We did a quick price search and the lowest priced AMD Radeon HD 7950 video card is the Power Color AX7950 at $279.99 plus shipping after a $20 rebate. To get three good game titles and a discount for Medal of Honor: Warfighter is pretty damn impressive. You spend ~$280 and then you get roughly $150 in game titles. Hard to go wrong there...

Article Title: AMD Never Settle Game Bundle & Catalyst 12.11 Driver Performance
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2059/1/

9-11% performance increase for free?! Nice! The performance increase is almost like a new generation card release! Way to go AMD!

Couple questions if you can answer them...

1) Did AMD tell you to look or test only certain games? Seems like this driver update was released like a new product.

2) Where exactly do you think the performance is coming from? Does this mean they are actually using the right drivers for the cards and the old ones were junk? Or is there something else going on here, i.e. rendering tweaks?

Major_A wrote:Couple questions if you can answer them...

1) Did AMD tell you to look or test only certain games? Seems like this driver update was released like a new product.

2) Where exactly do you think the performance is coming from? Does this mean they are actually using the right drivers for the cards and the old ones were junk? Or is there something else going on here, i.e. rendering tweaks?

1) AMD gave me the driver late last week with the slides in todays review and said do what you want. I had the option of do whatever I wanted. Since I just got done reviewing the Sapphire 7970 and this driver was going to ruin all the game performance charts I figured I'd update drivers and re-run all my usual tests. Something I should do on all the AMD cards. If I'm going to do all that work I might as well make an article of it and get some traffic out of it. I've done this over the years on other driver releases - http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1253/1/ and http://www.legitreviews.com/article/558/1/

2) AMD told me that they were under utilizing the cores and that they made memory cache improvements. Beyond that and denying shader swaps I was told nothing else. I asked for a list of changes several times and was never given one.

Thanks for the quick answers. Kind of makes you wonder how much performance is left on the table for cards that aren't directly worked on.

I can now say i am very impressed with the 7000 series. VERY.