Adapting to Parallelism: Catalyst 5.12 More Dual Core Friendly?

Performance Comparison: Cat 5.11 vs. Cat 5.12

The first thing we wanted to look at is the difference in scaling between driver versions. The following tables will show percent performance improvement of the beta 5.12 driver over that of the 5.11 driver. We will show performance improvements for both single and dual core configurations when moving to the beta driver.

While these numbers are, in fact, what users of single or dual core systems will experience when upgrading to newer drivers, there are other useful bits of information we can extract from them. We will be keeping an eye out for cases where the 5.12 driver performs worse than the 5.11 driver (these will be negative percentages in our tables). If, for instance, one tests shows the 5.12 driver doing worse in a single core platform and better in a dual core platform, we can discount some of the "value" of the dual core performance improvement as it's just making up for the performance hit on the single core side.

And as we can see from our Battlefield 2 test, The 5.11 driver performs as good as the 5.12 driver with no AA in 3 out of 6 tests. In the 8x6 case, the 5.11 driver handily bests the 5.12 beta. Enabling dual core allows the 5.12 driver to make up more than the ground it looses in single core performance, but the trade off just doesn't look good from this test.

Battlefield 2 Percent Increase (Cat 5.11 to 5.12)
	800x600	1024x768	1600x1200
Single Core	-9.19	-0.41	0.84
Dual Core	10.63	2.67	-0.21

And if you didn't think things could get worse, then just glance at the next table. The 5.12 driver tanks across the board on 4xAA performance under BF2. There isn't much more to say about this one.

Battlefield 2 4xAA Percent Increase (Cat 5.11 to 5.12)
	800x600	1024x768	1600x1200
Single Core	-5.05	-2.87	-0.89
Dual Core	-4.42	-0.15	-1.17

Without AA, playing DoD:S, the 5.12 driver performs almost identically to the 5.11 driver on single core systems. Flipping the switch gives us an instant boost at 8x6 and 10x12, and even a little nudge in the right direction at 1600x1200.

Day of Defeat Percent Increase (Cat 5.11 to 5.12)
	800x600	1024x768	1600x1200
Single Core	0.19	0.19	0.66
Dual Core	6.31	6.34	1.97

Enabling 4xAA doesn't seem to change much. We see a little more benefit (percentage wise) when using 5.12 under dual core in 800x600 and 1600x1200, but the gain over 5.11 at 1024x768 drops a little. Either way, Day of Defeat Source seems to show that theres definitely a little benefit to be had by upgrading dual core systems to 5.12 from 5.11 drivers.

Day of Defeat 4xAA Percent Increase (Cat 5.11 to 5.12)
	800x600	1024x768	1600x1200
Single Core	0.37	0.19	-0.27
Dual Core	6.69	4.31	2.66

There are a few cases where the 5.12 driver improves performance in FarCry over the 5.11 even without the aide of dual core. Even though we see high percentage improvement with 5.12 under dual core, some of this could be general improvements to the way ATI handles the game.

FarCry Percent Increase (Cat 5.11 to 5.12)
	800x600	1024x768	1600x1200
Single Core	0.11	3	-0.15
Dual Core	7.58	6.59	3.07

Again, even with 4xAA FarCry benefits from the 5.12 drivers in 4 out of 6 tests (with both of those tests being much more GPU limited at 1600x1200).

FarCry 4xAA Percent Increase (Cat 5.11 to 5.12)
	800x600	1024x768	1600x1200
Single Core	2.8	1.51	-1.5
Dual Core	7.26	4.92	-0.75

There isn't much to say other than there isn't any improvement under Quake 4 when upgrading to the 5.12 drivers.

Quake 4 Percent Increase (Cat 5.11 to 5.12)
	800x600	1024x768	1600x1200
Single Core	0.27	0.36	0
Dual Core	0.27	0.36	0.31

Which brings us to the test with the least change of all: Quake 4 with 4xAA.

Quake 4 4xAA Percent Increase (Cat 5.11 to 5.12)
	800x600	1024x768	1600x1200
Single Core	0.21	0.17	0
Dual Core	-0.21	0	0

Now let's take a look at performance improvement from a different perspective: improvement of a dual core system over a single core system.