AMD Catalyst 11.8 Driver Analysis

Sorry for being a bit delayed on this one, but it’s here none the less, and that in our eyes is better than having no driver analysis at all, don’t you agree?

In terms of AMD, we all know they’ve been focussing all of their energy and most likely anger on their new range of CPU’s; Bulldozer and due to this, we haven’t seen any new graphics cards from the market leader, but that’s generally the case for this time of year and we don’t expect much else. What we do expect is occasional updates to the driver software which can fix bugs and sometimes even give a nice performance boost.

So as another month passes, we see Catalyst 11.8 drivers being released with quite a few goodies included. The first includes new features which mainly comes down to AMD Overdrive supporting CPU and GPU overclocking controls within AMD Vision Control Center whilst the other key points is performance increases in certain games such as Crysis 2 and COD: Black Ops though users of MLAA should see up to a 30% performance increase across the board.

Also as expected, their are several bugs and issues that have been resolved across all key Windows operating systems, which includes XP, Vista and Windows 7 ranging from game fixes as well as benchmark and video playback problems.

In typical fashion, let’s break it down and see if these particular drivers have had any impact on our set of gaming benchmarks.