Catalyst 5.7 Drivers: Memory Limited Performance Improvements

X800 XT 256

Another glaring issue that we ran into with the new drivers was what appeared to be a small performance hit with some of the higher memory cards. On the X800 XT, FarCry's framerates for all resolutions without AA enabled actually went down with the 5.7 drivers, although only very slightly. As you can see, there is at most about a 2 fps decrease here, not enough to cause a problem with game play, but it's still a loss. This is most likely due to unnecessary swapping. With these higher memory cards, ATI's HyperMemory is actually causing the slight loss in fps because of the extra computation time needed to swap out data from memory. There aren't really any losses with the other games on this card, and even in FarCry, the lower framerates with catalyst 5.7 without AA are still very playable. The only significant decrease in framerate because of this bug here is with FarCry at 1920x1200 with AA enabled. The framerate drops from 25.6 fps with 5.6 to 22.2 fps on the 5.7 drivers; about a 15% decrease in performance. This would definitely cause a noticeable difference in game play, but the initial 25.6 fps would have made most people change their settings anyway.