There’s not much new in the latest Catalyst release for gamers really, so I decided to grab a couple games and run a comparison of 8.12 and 9.1 releases, and not do a whole bunch of games and benchmarks. I wasn’t expecting much of an improvement and didn’t really get any either, so no disappointments here.

 

Here’s a bit of the notes from the 9.1 release, you can find everything pertaining to the release

Actually we see a small drop running the 9.1 drivers under DX9 with FC2.

Again here we see similar results

Next up we have Crysis, maxed settings, 1850×1050, 16xAA, Very High

A very small improvement over the 8.12 drivers

The average FPS drops a bit, though not playable at those rates with either driver version.

So is there anything new here, depends, I don’t see much new in terms of graphics performance really. The improvements are apparently more in the background and compatibility or bug fixes really, and of course the OpenGL 3.0 support now.

I did run other tests as well like Crysis Warhead and 3dMark06, and I got very similar results, not much new in terms of performance boosting properties with this release.