AnandTech: "In an off year that hasn’t seen too many new product releases thus far, this has been anything but a dull time. For the better part of a year now the technology journalist community – spearheaded by The Tech Report’s Scott Wasson – has been investigating the matter of frame pacing and frame timing on GPUs. In applying new techniques and new levels of rigor, Scott found that frames were not being rendered as consistently as we had always assumed they were, and that cards that were equal in performance as measured by frame rates were not necessarily equal in in performance as measured by frame intervals. It was AMD in particular who was battered by all of this work, with the discovery that both their single-GPU and multi-GPU products were experiencing poor frame pacing at times. AMD could meet (and beat) NVIDIA on frame rates, only to lose out on smoothness as a result of poor frame pacing."
GamersNexus: "Catalyst Omega introduces direct competitors to NVIDIA technology (like DSR, seen here), offers greater Linux support, and hosts a suite of media playback smoothing options. We'll look into all of those here, along with some driver benchmarks."
Maximum PC: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) promised performance gains of up to 15 percent with its Catalyst 12.11 driver, which the company announced in conjunction with its "Never Settle" game bundles. Our own evaluation of the driver update using a Radeon HD 7970 yielded mostly minor framerate bumps compared to Catalyst 12.8, though performance did improve in the majority of games and benchmarks we tested it with. If you're interested in grabbing the new driver package, it's now available to download, albeit in beta form.
AMD has released Radeon Catalyst 11.8 drivers. In particular the new drivers will bring significant performance improvements to Black Ops, Crysis 2 and FEAR 3.
Not really this seems to be an update for only people with crossfire... I just have a single 6970 card and when I run the update software 11.7 nothing comes up to update..
so I went to the site and it said it was for some crossfire improvements so maybe it's not for us single card users..
-I'm not updating unless it pops up in my Catalyst Control Center ? I don't want to mess anything up since I am running really sweet right now..
CCC isn't particularly reliable for picking up updates as soon as they're out. I always download manually. I've installed 11.8 for my 5770 and everything is working fine.
Not sure where you've got the crossfire info from but if you check out the release notes there are just a few bug fixes which apply to crossfire setups. The majority of it relates to both single or dual cards. All of the major performance improvements apply to your single 6970 card, so you'd be better off updating.
@Tsardom
Thanks for the feedback, I have now updated to 11.8 and everything is running smooth and nice.. I guess I was reading the wrong thing.. so thanks again
It's all running sweet now.. Crysis 2 runs sweet..
I just purchased a radeon last week. Does the catalyst program automatically download drivers?
