Jumping Right To It

Okay, we admit it, this is too soon. But AMD has the world abuzz about the upcoming Catalyst 7.10 ‘Shoot-em-up’ drivers and we need to see how they affected our round up of DX10 titles we tested last week. Here’s the update.
AMD Brings Catalyst 7.10

Just a few short days ago, I posted another article that looked at the DX10 performance of the top graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA using up-to-date drivers and patches for all titles.  Just 6 days later, that’s all crap.  Gee, thanks.

Seriously though, after the publication of our review, AMD contacted me about an updated Catalyst driver, version 7.10, that I was told would dramatically change the results of our testing.  Of course, I could have told them to go stick it, as the review reflected the status of AMD’s GPU performance as of that date, and it did.  But I knew that AMD deserved another chance at it, just as I constantly am getting new drivers from the green team (brighter green at least) throughout product launches and lifespans.

So, after receiving an early copy of the 7.10 “Shoot-em-up” driver as it somehow seems to have been named, I set out to spend my weekend doing some MORE graphics testing. 

System Setup and Benchmarks

In my previous article, I spent a lot of time describing the various games that we were going to be using, what features they added with DX10 that didn’t exist in DX9 and other interesting notes that I am going to leave out here for fear of sound a little too repetitive.  If you haven’t seen the previous review, I suggest you hop on over and read this page of it so you can get up to speed on what we are testing, and why. 

DirectX 10 Test System Setup

CPU

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 – Review

Motherboards

EVGA nForce 680i Motherboard – Review
Intel 975XBX Motherboard (for CrossFire testing)

Memory 

Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C4

Hard Drive

Western Digital Raptor 150 GB – Review

Sound Card

Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value

Video Card

AMD ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT – Review
EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
NVIDIA Reference GeForce 8800 GTX – Review

Video Drivers

AMD Catalyst 7.10 Beta
AMD Catalyst – 7.9 + Hotfix
NVIDIA Forceware 163.69
Power Supply PC Power and Cooling 1000 watt

DirectX Version

DX10

Operating System

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

  • Bioshock
  • Company of Heroes 1.7.1
  • Call of Juarez
  • Lost Planet
  • World in Conflict

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