Catalyst 13.6 Beta drivers

[Tame]

I installed the new 13.6 Beta drivers and compared the performance in PCSX2 against 13.2 Beta7, which I have been using.

I used a certain save state position in FFXII with DX11 Hardware mode 1920x1080 resolution and 4x msaa hack.

With 13.2 I got 145 fps (measured with Fraps) and with 13.6 jaw dropping 203 fps! That's insane 40% increase

I switched to 3840x2160 (and no AA) and still got ~ the same fps (with very nice quality), my cpu might even start to bottleneck since the fps only increases to 223 fps if I use native res.

I'm on HD 7850, Win7 64bit

If you have a 7xxx series card you might want to try these drivers out, or then it's just me

PS. Got crossfire (well my 2. gpu showed some sings of going under load) forced on somehow with Crysis 3 profile, but the performance is worse than with crossfire disabled

[refraction]

Hopefully that means AMD have fixed some of their driver bugs ;p

[Akio]

I'm using a 7870 with the driver version 13.4. Will try 13.6 when it's officially released. I've no problem with the current performance.

[||dav1de||]

HD7850 win 7 64bit
I tried Gran Turismo 4, Silent Hill 2 (both at 6x native) and the Bios as in the GPU bench.
Going from 13.2 to 13.6 beta didn't changed the FPS

[Tame]

HD7850 win 7 64bit
I tried Gran Turismo 4, Silent Hill 2 (both at 6x native) and the Bios as in the GPU bench.
Going from 13.2 to 13.6 beta didn't changed the FPS

Hmm, I too tried GT4 and there wasn't much performance increase indeed...

I don't know what it was but I'm sure the fps increased for me in this particular case. It just might have been that 13.2 beta7 were not performing well...

I also got from 40 fps to 50 fps increase in furmark, so it can't totally just be my imagination

Anyways you are probably right about waiting for the next official release, unless you have problems with the previous drivers.

[Koji]

Hmm, I too tried GT4 and there wasn't much performance increase indeed...

I don't know what it was but I'm sure the fps increased for me in this particular case. It just might have been that 13.2 beta7 were not performing well...

I also got from 40 fps to 50 fps increase in furmark, so it can't totally just be my imagination

Anyways you are probably right about waiting for the next official release, unless you have problems with the previous drivers.

I think GT4 is much more likely to be CPU limited. I have a 7870 so I'll run some test (I'm on 13.3 currently). I'll mix in some PC benchmarks too just for shicks and kiggles.

(edit) Checking the 13.6 patch notes and there is absolutely nothing there that has to do with performance. It's all stuff related to adding the new APUs to the support list and support for Adobe Premiere video acceleration (finally!!). Aside from that though, if there was any increase in speed, it'd have come from an earlier patch. Still running benchmarks right now.

[||dav1de||]

I think GT4 is much more likely to be CPU limited. I have a 7870 so I'll run some test (I'm on 13.3 currently). I'll mix in some PC benchmarks too just for shicks and kiggles.

I tried GT4 with resolution 6x native, it wasn't CPU limited, I also tried increasing the GPU frequency and the FPS increased as well, so i wasn't even limited by the VRAM bandwith (that was untouched).

[Koji]

Okay, results:

.hack//GU 6x (definitely GPU limited)
110~ 13.3
110~ 13.6b

Star Ocean 3 (not GPU limited, but figured I'd give it a try)
65~ 13.3
65~ 13.6b

At least with the games I tried, there was absolutely no difference... For PC games...

Tomb Raider (a game mentioned in 13.4 as "Significantly improves latency performance in Skyrim, Boderlands 2, Guild Wars 2, Tomb Raider and Hitman Absolution")
Min Max Average (max settings and tressFX)
50 83 66 on 13.3
52 87 68 on 13.6b

So... maybe 4% better there.

Bioshock Infinite (max settings and DoF)
Average Min Max
46.90, 10.82, 76.53 on 13.3
48.59, 14.03, 139.68 on 13.6b

Now that's actually something! 30% higher minimum frames and nearly double max frames... not that max frames means anything, especially since average only went up 2fps... but the raise in minimum is nice.

Either way, I got nothing from PCSX2 on the updated drives. Not saying OP isn't getting something since he updated from slightly older drivers and it may be different depending on the game, but there wasn't a general improvement at least.

(edit) Bonus round, 3dmark

before 4649
after 4817

So another 3-4% boost. Still nothing on pcsx2 though

[StriFe]

I'm using the 13.5 WHQL Drivers myself and I get about 58-60 fps in Bioshock Infinite throughout the entire game

Btw shouldn't this be in hardware/software?

[Tame]

Yeah, the GT4 is not cpu limited...

Anyway I should have tested more with different games (had I known it comes to this ^^), but I just wanted to check that the performance wouldn't at least dramatically drop with the new drivers
I'm too lazy to instal the old drivers back just to check again, and I have also had some bad experiences of swapping old and new drivers over and over again.

Also just because the feature highlights don't mention any performance increases doesn't mean they actually didn't do anything under the surface in the betas. Though, I upgraded from betas which have had a few WHQL after them, so probably the performance increase accumulated a bit somewhere between

But yeah, the fps happened to be really high in my test case so probably doesn't tell that much about max performance in heavier situations... Definitely not +40% fps in across PCSX2

Anyway at least there's nothing wrong with these drivers and lets wait for the rumored memory optimizations in the summer - sorry if I posted this in the wrong section, got a little excited over the fps gain I got