Are you dutiful about keeping your drivers up-to-date? AMD does a pretty fantastic job about maintaining a monthly release schedule, after all. Today we look at how much performance you can expect from an old card in new games using four driver packages.
We update drivers for two reasons: stability and performance. When it comes to graphics, both are important, but it’s the latter we quantify using benchmarks.
Beyond making sure a game doesn’t crash, stability is difficult to measure. So, we make sure everything runs the way it should and move on.
On the other hand, performance is what built our industry. We want more frames per second. Sometimes, a performance boost necessitates an entirely new graphics card. But we’ve also seen examples of older boards picking up momentum thanks to focused driver development. If we can get extra speed via simple software updates, well, we’ll take it.
We’ll break down the evolution of an Nvidia-based card in our next instalment of this series. For now, we’re tracking the performance of AMD’s vaunted Radeon HD 5870 over the course of its still-useful life.
The Radeon HD 5870 was released in mid-September 2009. So let’s assume you waited for at least a month to see what Nvidia was offering and ended up buying the 5870 in November. That means you've owned it for about a year and a half. Since that time, we've seen 15 driver updates.
| Driver | Date |
|---|---|
| Catalyst 11.2 | 2/15/11 |
| Catalyst 11.1 | 1/26/11 |
| Catalyst 10.12 | 12/13/10 |
| Catalyst 10.11 | 11/17/10 |
| Catalyst 10.10 | 10/22/10 |
| Catalyst 10.9 | 9/15/10 |
| Catalyst 10.8 | 8/25/10 |
| Catalyst 10.7 | 7/26/10 |
| Catalyst 10.6 | 6/16/10 |
| Catalyst 10.5 | 5/26/10 |
| Catalyst 10.4 | 4/28/10 |
| Catalyst 10.3 | 3/24/10 |
| Catalyst 10.2 | 2/17/10 |
| Catalyst 10.1 | 1/27/10 |
| Catalyst 9.12 | 12/17/09 |
| Catalyst 9.11 | 11/17/09 |
| Catalyst 9.10 | 10/22/09 |
After sinking close to $400 on that once flagship Radeon HD 5870, there is a good chance you've been updating its driver on a consistent basis. Each installation was probably preceded by the following introduction in AMD's Catalyst release notes:
This article provides information on the latest posting of AMD’s software suite, AMD Catalyst 11.1. This particular software suite updates both the AMD display driver, and the AMD Catalyst Control Centre. This unified driver has been updated to provide an enhanced level of power, performance, and reliability.
But have we really seen enhanced “power, performance, and reliability”? We are accustomed to seeing very small improvements in performance from one software update to the next. If every driver provides a performance bump, there should be a big difference between the first driver that supported the 5870 and the one AMD blogged about last month, right? Have those updates really been worthwhile? We are selecting four update packages from the original 15 to examine exactly what it means to keep your driver up-to-date.
- One Year Worth Of Drivers
- Test Hardware And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Lost Planet 2 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Aliens Vs. Predator (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: F1 2010 (DX11)
- Benchmark Results: Just Cause 2
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcarft: Cataclysm
- Final Words
i to got my card in November and frankly haven't seen any great improvements and 10 percent should be noticeable across the board but it just isn't. the biggest improvements have come from the games companies themselves via patching. add to that the sheer amount of users i know personally that have sold there ati cards because of bad driversupport. gives the overall impression, ati need to do better.
Is there any point in upgrading drivers after more than a year, what about more than two years (I'm thinking about cards of the ATi 4xxx ilk, but you could look even older than that)? Especially as there's always the risk of cock-ups as noted by the previous two comments, at what point is it best to stop upgrading.
i dont think they included it because there has been no specific driver updates for it so it would be pure chance if they got more performance...
Thanks HEXiT.
I am happy with my 5830 however if I couldn't overclock this card I would hate it, it runs crysis 2 maxed out @ 1080p perfectly which is good enough for me!