AMD Catalyst 13.9 WHQL to 14.7 RC Benchmark Comparison - 4% Overall Increase with Interesting Anomaly

Drivers are very interesting things; they commonly work out of sight but are just as important as the GPU itself. It is with these thoughts in mind that I would like to post something very interesting today: a benchmark comparison (courtesy of DG Lee over at IYD.KR) of all the driver releases between and including Catalyst 13.nine WHQL and 14.7 RC. I would as well similar to point out a very interesting anomaly that I noticed in the benchmarks. AMD A-Series Old Robot

Curious Lookout Dogs Anomaly - Catalyst xiii.nine WHQL to fourteen.7 RC Shows 4% Improvement Overall

Let me brainstorm by maxim that the benchmarks were conducted by DG Lee and all measures were taken to ensure that the system remained constant and only the drivers were changed. Catalyst versions were completely and thoroughly removed earlier the side by side version was benchmarked, since drivers are notorious for sticking around afterwards they have out stayed their welcome. Lets begin with the testing rig used:

Intel Core i7 4770K
AVEXIR DDR3 PC3-12800 CL9 16GB (4x4)
AMD R9 280X 3GB
ASUS Maximus 7 Hero
Team L3 SSD 240GB
Corsair AX 750 Gilt
Windows 7 Ultimate

That is a pretty high end build with all bottlenecks accounted for completely. The drivers that were tested are: Goad fourteen.7 Release Candidate, Catalyst 14.6 Release Candidate, Catalyst 14.4 WHQL, Catalyst 14.iii WHQL, Catalyst 14.ii Beta, Goad 14.1 Beta, Catalyst 13.11 WHQL, Catalyst 13.ten WHQL and Goad xiii.9 WHQL. A very wide array of games was tested, including Watch Dogs, Crysis 3, Battlefield 4, Metro 2033 and many more. Without any further ado here are some of the benchmarks:

As you can see at that place is a stock-still pattern to the benchmarks. Nearly all of the data lies within very small parameters and variation is very slight, if at all. And while in some cases you see a operation increase going up the Goad versions, in others yous actually see downgraded performance. However, this is to exist expected and quite standard. Now this is where the Watch Dogs bibelot comes in. In the driver benchmark of Goad 14.7 RC, the frames per second take a massive leap. Run into for yourself: 3_wd The frames per second jumps from 46 to 58. That is an absolutely insane amount of performance increase merely from a driver update. I looked up at AMD Catalyst 14.7 RC notes and at that place was no mention of a functioning increase this significant so the side by side thought that came to me was human mistake. Contacting IYD netted me the following ii possibilities: A weird 1 of a kind software glitch (not homo fault) or the bench beingness completely legit. Yous would recall that there was some pretty hot talk betwixt AMD and Nvidia over Game Works and Watch Dogs. AMD stated that the reason for the poor performance was that the Game Works library was closed source, however Nvidia stated that they had nothing to practice with it.

If the benchmark is legit then this raises a very interesting question. What exactly happened? I am pretty sure Nvidia didn't hand over the source files to Game Works so how did Red manage this pregnant an increment? Well, not to take sides, but I retrieve there is a slight chance that the issue was with Catalyst drivers from the first and AMD realized that and patched information technology upwards. Since no other game had anywhere most this kind of performance increase, we are not looking at miracle optimization either. This is certainly good news for AMD users who were getting the short terminate of the stick with Watch Dogs.

#AMD Catalyst Driver benches. Very interesting Sentinel Dogs anomaly. If anyone tin can recreate that, would love to know. http://t.co/k8alhO8onV

— Usman Pirzada (@usmanpirzada) August 22, 2022