Catalyst 5.7 Drivers: Memory Limited Performance Improvements

Final Words

Overall, the new 5.7 drivers will please the majority of ATI users out there, but the performance hit (even if it is small) with the higher memory cards isn't acceptable and might annoy some people. We feel that ATI should have at least given users the option to turn off HyperMemory for the higher memory cards, which should have completely resolved the issue.

Another not-so-great thing about the new drivers is that some of the performance increase claims in the driver release notes are slightly misleading. While we did see a lot of the gains that they mentioned in most of the games, we found many of these increases to be with cards so limited (performance-wise) that they didn't matter. ATI claims in the release notes that the greatest gains in performance will be on cards with 128MB and 64MB of RAM. We found this to be true, but as we saw on the x600 128MB card, almost all of the tests that saw gains still had framerates that were unplayable. Likely, you will see some performance increases on 64MB cards, but you won't be able to run the games at the high settings that ATI claims will produce the highest gains.

That being said, the good definitely out-weighs the bad here. As we mentioned, hardly anyone will notice any decrease in performance in their games with the catalyst 5.7 drivers, and many will notice an increase, especially those with older ATI gear.

Now, the question is, who will this latest driver make the most happy? Our tests showed performance gains with the 128MB cards, and of the games that we tested, FarCry seems to get the best improvements with the new driver. So, if you own a 128MB ATI card and you play FarCry, you should be very happy indeed. Half-Life 2 also sees a lot of improvement, which should please many people as well (especially as many current and future games will be using HL2's Source engine). Undoubtedly, some of you with higher-end ATI cards may have missed the small print in ATI's release notes, cranked up the settings and hoped to see phenomenal gains; but instead, were crestfallen with the results. To be sure, your performance won't (necessarily) be worse, but with what ATI has to look forward to seemingly so far beyond the horizon, more might have been expected from this driver update.

Any way that you look at it, driver updates are free, and, with the exception of the mostly-harmless data swapping performance loss issue, catalyst 5.7 will serve to help many ATI customers. It's nice to know that ATI is taking care of its patrons (both old and new), but with NVIDIA so far ahead of the game right now in the high-end, we can't help but wonder what's happening at ATI's camp to cause these delays. So, as we wait for Crossfire and R520, we hope for the sake of competition that the new releases from the Canadian company will be enough to live up to the high standard that NVIDIA has set with the G70.