Catalyst 11.8 delivers 20% performance boost in Black Ops, more

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Released late last month in preview form for 64-bit Windows 7 users, AMD's Catalyst 11.8 driver suite has now received Microsoft's nod of approval. If you installed the prerelease build a few short weeks ago, you'll probably still want to grab today's update as it contains some new features for AMD Overdrive, numerous bug fixes and additional gaming performance tweaks. Likewise, folks running Catalyst 11.7 and earlier stand to gain many improvements.

Performance-wise, 11.8 grants Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series owners a 10% boost when playing Crysis 2 in DirectX 11 with anti-aliasing enabled and disabled. You'll also get up to 8% more frames when running F.E.A.R. 3 with DX11 and AA enabled, up to 20% in Call of Duty: Black Ops for both single and multi-GPU configurations, and as much as 30% more performance when AMD's morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA) is enabled through the CCC.

Download Catalyst 11.8
Desktop: Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit
Mobile: Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit

Beyond raw speed increases, Catalyst 11.8 also receives an update to AMD Overdrive that includes both CPU and GPU overclocking controls in the Vision Control Center (CPU overclocking is limited to Black Edition chips). There are around a dozen bug fixes, many of which caused BSODs, black screens and video corruption in various applications and games including 3DMark 11, StarCraft 2 and F.E.A.R. 3. You can view the full release notes here or on our download pages.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/45129-catalyst-118-delivers-20-performance-boost-in-black-ops-more.html

 

[DeliciousPie]

Drivers that make a noticable difference are always nice.

We all know how important it is to keep them up to date, but when you can actually feel a change, well, that kicks ***.

 

[Guest]

these drivers come a day after i upgrade to a 2500K and P8P67 EVO with two 6950 2GB's... life is good.

 

[blimp01]

i wish nvidia would make performance increases

 

[NTAPRO]

Forgive me for the question but I don't exactly understand the relationship between frames and fps games. I don't mean it in exactly that way but it's just hard to explain. I play emulators online. And for the one that I play the most, 59.95-60 is the desired amount of fps.

 

[red1776]

NTAPRO said:
Forgive me for the question but I don't exactly understand the relationship between frames and fps games. I don't mean it in exactly that way but it's just hard to explain. I play emulators online. And for the one that I play the most, 59.95-60 is the desired amount of fps.

I think you are speaking of :

FPS = Frames per second

...and

FPS= First person Shooter

 

[dividebyzero]

And for the one that I play the most, 59.95-60 is the desired amount of fps.

That pretty much goes for FPS (First person shooters) also. A minimum of ~30 fps gives the impression to the human eye of relative smoothness. An average of ~60 is in line with the more common monitor refresh rate.

i wish nvidia would make performance increases

In other news...startling new evidence of inter-species breeding. Film at eleven

 

[NTAPRO]

red1776 said:

NTAPRO said:
Forgive me for the question but I don't exactly understand the relationship between frames and fps games. I don't mean it in exactly that way but it's just hard to explain. I play emulators online. And for the one that I play the most, 59.95-60 is the desired amount of fps.

I think you are speaking of :

FPS = Frames per second

...and

FPS= First person Shooter

Yeah I probably shouldn't have abbreviated both of them.

 

[Guest]

Id really like to update to these drivers, but everytime i update it causes my crossfire to stop working. To fix it, i have to remove 1 card, reinstall drivers, shut down PC, install second card again, reinstall drivers, reboot. Such a pain. Next card will be green. Will never run multi card setup again.

 

[Guest]

these drivers also upped my WEI score for graphics. kudos to AMD.

 

[Lionvibez]

Guest said:
Id really like to update to these drivers, but everytime i update it causes my crossfire to stop working. To fix it, i have to remove 1 card, reinstall drivers, shut down PC, install second card again, reinstall drivers, reboot. Such a pain. Next card will be green. Will never run multi card setup again.

Crossfire and SLI have always been a pain in the *** it took your hundreds of dollars in hardware to figure this out?

Do you not read internet forums?

 

[Guest]

Holy crap your right. My WEI went from 7.7 to 7.8 on graphics. Way to go AMD!!!

 

[Relic]

AMD said:
Known issues under the Windows 7 operating system: Battlefield ? Bad Company 2 may randomly hang after a period of game play.

Meh, was hoping this would be resolved .

 

[Guest]

Oh wow. I thought that was just a heat issue. Pain in the *** that is. Hasn't happened since update though.

 

[03504bbl]

I recently updated to catalyst 11.8. I fully uninstalled the previous version and ran driver sweeper in safe mode before installing 11.8. I didn't run in to any problems during installation, however my pc will not run correctly with this version of drivers. I got a noticeable performance boost in Portal 2, but got a serious performance drop in Black Ops. Not to mention I ended up having to downgrade because these drivers caused DirectX to crash constantly, no matter what game I tried, and even caused BSOD's from some of the driver's .sys files. I have never had any issue when updating my catalyst drivers and cant find any posts on the net with the problems I'm having. Is anyone out there having these issues?