AMD Catalyst 15.7 WHQL Driver Analysis

Introduction

AMD have been lagging behind in the GPU market for a little while now; no matter what they seem to deliver, NVIDIA always seems to trump them almost immediately. This doesn’t always mean that NVIDIA produce the most powerful graphics cards, just look at the R9 Fury X, it nips at the heels of the GTX Titan X or GTX 980Ti in almost every test and in some cases beats both.

Something that NVIDIA is always above AMD in is consistent driver releases. With almost every big title game that has been released in recent months; NVIDIA has had a driver ready. Along with this, most of the drivers are WHQL rated, which AMD hasn’t released since late 2014.

In the newest driver from AMD, it’s the first WHQL driver since December 9th 2014, that is 211 days, which is extremely bad. This driver seems to have been released in the run-up to the launch of Windows 10, which will see the launch of not only a new operating system, but also the highly anticipated launch of DirectX 12; which promises to bring a performance increase unlike we’ve ever seen before.

Additional to DX12 and Windows 10 support, Virtual Super Resolution (VSR) is included, which basically renders the detail of a higher resolution display and presents them on a lower resolution display.

As with all driver updates, consult the release notes to ensure that the driver will not impact your current gaming standards. So let’s jump straight into testing to see if there are any changes to our current testing programs.