New Radeon drivers to increase performance ‘significantly’

Working in the AMD graphics team, right now, must be one of the most bizarre experiences in the world. While departments are scrambling everywhere to deal with the company's new focus into non-PC space by 2022, the graphics team are quietly doing exactly what they're required to do. KitGuru checks some of the early reports on rises in Radeon rapidity.

There are few pieces of software that can completely change your system's performance in a dramatic way, but the graphics driver is one of them.

With the company's share price sitting just over the $2 mark, the Catalyst driver team have pushed out what seems to be a bit of a winner in pure speed terms.

Alongside the brand new game bundle that we reported on earlier, will be Catalyst 12.11 (denoting 2012 and 11th month). It is a 3rd generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) driver and a brief chat with sources inside AMD reveal the following performance increase expectation at 1920×1080:-

• Battlefield 3 on a 7970 will jump by almost 30%
• Skyrim will increase almost 4% on a 7870
• Lower end graphic cards will also get a boost of more than 10% in games like Starcraft

KitGuru says: It must be very frustrating for the graphics driver team right now. They are doing everything they can to go toe-to-toe with nVidia, but that battle no longer has real significance for the company overall. It will be interesting to see if the driver guys can affect the overall battles for APU, Console and other embedded programmes etc to the same degree.

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