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Jumping Right To It

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

Next Page - Bioshock

Review Index:
- Select - Summary Jumping Right To It Bioshock Bioshock (cont'd) Company of Heroes Company of Heroes (cont'd) Call of Juarez Call of Juarez (cont'd) Lost Planet Lost Planet (cont'd) World in Conflict World in Conflict (cont'd) Power Consumption and Conclusions