OK, so you buy the fastest graphics card you can afford, but even then the performance isn't enough. You want drivers that will squeeze every last bit of performance out of the card. New games come out, and new drivers follow to make the most of that game. Performance isn't the whole picture either; there are of course bugs that need fixing. However, driver performance is what we're focusing on today, with a look at ATi's CATALAYST 4.12 driver release.
As far as CATALYST 4.12 goes, the big news here is probably for those of you still playing Half-Life 2 in some shape or form, as this driver has certainly rolled out another set of fine performance improvements. Generally speaking, this driver set seems to be a stable and fast one, with most applications finding some benefit performance-wise, however small. The really big leaps can be seen for anyone still running CATALYST 4.10 or driver sets previous to that, as basically every test in our suite showed some big gains moving between 4.10 and 4.12.
Read the analysis here.