ATI Catalyst 8.6 driver for Radeon graphics cards: XP and Vista performance

The new ATI Catalyst 8.6 driver for Radeon graphics cards has just been released by AMD and you may want to know how well this driver performs under Microsoft Windows Vista and XP, Tweak Town take a closer look and show the results over 11 pages. They found that the new Catalyst driver has some good performance promises but wanted to give it a run on their mighty test bed.

In the final thoughts, they had this to say “While in the applications we tested there hasn’t been any notable gains with the HD 3870 X2 actually taking a hit in a few cases, the new drivers generally seem to be increasing performance in the promised sections for people.

What’s really interesting about this driver is if you take the time to read the performance improvements, they all revolve around DX10 improvements. It will be interesting to see if this is something we begin to see more of over the coming months; Vista has really picked up momentum in the gamers market with most people jumping onboard.

Considering how hard at work AMD has been on the new HD 4800 series, it’s surprising to see any real gains from this month’s driver, but they’ve managed to do it. No doubt over the coming months AMDs focus will begin to move to the HD 4800 series of cards in a continuing effort to compete against NVIDIA”.

If you want to get a detailed look at the results and how well these drivers perform on different games in XP and Vista then click the read link below.

Read the 11 page review.

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