My friend uses Cat. 3.5's instead of the newer 4.6 or 4.7 because of faster bench's. any truth?

[dowxp]

have a R9800P on the way and i'd like to figure out if there is any truth to 3.5's being faster than 4.x

- dowxp

 

[John]

Faster in what....3D Mark? Usually the newer revisions fix assorted game issues.

 

[Matthias99]

There was an article not too long ago (a link was posted in Video) about this. The 3.5-3.7s are a *hair* faster in 3DMark01/03 than the 4.6-4.7 drivers (there was a bit of a dip in benchmark performance from about 3.8-4.3), but the newer drviers fix a lot of bugs and run better in most "real" games. Unless all you care about is maximizing your benchmark numbers, or the newest drivers have known issues in games you play, you should use the newer drivers.

 

[Sideswipe001]

Check the Rage3d forums. The only reason I've ever heard for people to use older drivers is because bugs were introduced in newer ones, making some games unstable or causing problems. It's quite common for people to use the OGL drivers from older Cats to play KOTOR or NWN for example.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I saw an article on a web site that showed benchmarks on several systems and several games, and the only thing that they changed between each test was the Cat versions. Newer Cats seem to do a hair better on 3DMark, etc., but actual in-game performance actually gradually decreased, for UT (or maybe UT2K3, I don't recall).

I've been wondering that myself, I've had a few minor issues with Cat 4.6s, and heard good things about Cat 3.10s mentioned.

 

[PhoenixOrion]

Originally posted by: dowxp
have a R9800P on the way and i'd like to figure out if there is any truth to 3.5's being faster than 4.x

- dowxp

Depends.....on which card (ex: 9600 vs x800) and what benchmark (synthetic vs game, d3d vs gl).

 

[vailr]

I'd suggest using DriverHeaven.com's "Driver Cleaner".
http://www.driverheaven.net/cleaner/
Sometimes, a few of the older driver files remain behind, whenever updating a system to a newer Catalyst driver.