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AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 3870 on Vantage

By Robert Dow

Figure 1: AMD Radeon HD3870X2 driver tests on Vantage. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

AMD released a 3DMark Vantage Hotfix (Catalyst 8.4.71.1 for those of you scoring at home—not quite Tinker to Evers to Chance but you get the idea. The new driver release is designed to deliver performance enhancements and bug fixes for 3DMark’s new Vantage Benchmark.

The new driver applies to Radeon HD 3870 Series through the Radeon HD 2400 Series. Vantage is a benchmark solely for Windows Vista 32 and 64-bit DirectX 10.

We ran the tests on the SkullTrail. For our testing purposes, we employed the Radeon 3870 X2. The performance with the latest driver gives you a 4.5% rise in performance over the Catalyst 8.3 and bettered Catalyst 8.4 by 3% running at 1920x1440 no AA. Running at 1600x1200, the Hotfix gave us a 4% and .2% increase over Catalyst 83 and 8.4 respectively. The largest improvement we saw with the new driver was in 1600x1200 with 4X AA. The new Catalyst driver outperformed 8.4 by 4% in this configuration and out-classed 8.3 by over 5.5%—a notable increase to be certain. The increases in performance were not as pronounced in higher resolutions with 4X AA. In those tests, the latest driver only gave us a nominal performance enhancement with the HD 3870 X2.

What do we think?

It’s interesting to see how a company can tweak and improve their drivers given a little time. This stuff is getting so complicated it just can’t be done quickly. And that leads one to wonder about the value of the quick first-out-of-the-chute evaluations—how stable is that data?

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