What drivers are used for Anandtech bench?

[Gregster1970]

Hi guys,

Sorry if this has been asked before but I use your fantastic bench comparison site to show the differences between differenct GPU's but anytime I use the 7970/7950 comparison. I got told that Anandtech are using older drivers (pre 12.11) and that it doesn't show fair.

Is this true? and if so what drivers were used please?

Thanks for the info

 

[wand3r3r]

If I had to guess which version of drivers are being used it'd probably be the same as each products initial review. For the 7970/50 it's likely from the beginning of 2012. The 680/670 are probably from when they were released last spring. They certainly aren't accurate because both camps have improved the drivers, with the 7950 gaining the most.

They are supposedly going to make a 2013 bench at some point but I don't know the timeline for that.

HardOCP made a couple reviews, one for AMD and another for NV.
AMD
http://hardocp.com/article/2013/02/18/2012_amd_video_card_driver_performance_review/
AMD and NV
http://hardocp.com/article/2013/03/04/2012_amd_nvidia_driver_performance_summary_review/
NV
http://hardocp.com/article/2013/01/21/2012_nvidia_video_card_driver_performance_review/#.USyVmqU3v3A

The 7950 gains are pretty major, although it took a long time to wreak out the potential of GCN.

 

[Gregster1970]

Cheers for the reply.

I always noticed that the 680 was faster in BF3 and then the site was overhauled and now the 7970 is the quicker (using Anandtech bench comparison), so I assumed they had rebenched but maybe I was wrong in the first instance.

 

[BrentJ]

Just answering for us (HardOCP), I always use the latest driver out at the time. New drivers are constantly being dropped, AMD alone releases multiple Beta releases per driver version. For example, Cat 13.2 had about 4 or 5 public Beta releases within it. Right now, 13.3 is up to Beta 3. It is hard to keep up, and if you don't constantly refresh, you will be left behind in your data fast.

When we review video cards, we run the data all over again, fresh, with whatever driver is available at the start of the review, every review gets a fresh run-through with drivers out at the time, we constantly check for driver updates. Sometimes things overlap, but rare. If a new driver comes out, and it hasn't changed performance in any of the games we are using, we might re-use data if it overlaps during an evaluation, otherwise, every review is fresh.

It's not an easy thing to do, and everyone can't do it. I make it a point to do it. I'm very anal about game patch updates and driver updates.

 

[Stuka87]

As far as I know Anandtech updates drivers and reruns each card when they do a review. Which I think should be par for the course of most any review site.

As I understood it Bench uses the data from these tests that get entered into their database. Maybe Ryan will stop in and let us know how that all works.

 

[wand3r3r]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2300556

GPU Bench 2013 will be going live this month, so you'll see new data then.

From February so I guess they are imminent.

 

[Gregster1970]

Just answering for us (HardOCP), I always use the latest driver out at the time. New drivers are constantly being dropped, AMD alone releases multiple Beta releases per driver version. For example, Cat 13.2 had about 4 or 5 public Beta releases within it. Right now, 13.3 is up to Beta 3. It is hard to keep up, and if you don't constantly refresh, you will be left behind in your data fast.

When we review video cards, we run the data all over again, fresh, with whatever driver is available at the start of the review, every review gets a fresh run-through with drivers out at the time, we constantly check for driver updates. Sometimes things overlap, but rare. If a new driver comes out, and it hasn't changed performance in any of the games we are using, we might re-use data if it overlaps during an evaluation, otherwise, every review is fresh.

It's not an easy thing to do, and everyone can't do it. I make it a point to do it. I'm very anal about game patch updates and driver updates.

I am always interested in bench results and recommend cards from both red and green depending on what the user is after. It is hard to keep up and I fully expect at times that drivers bring much better performance to certain games and this makes it very hard for bench results to maintain any consistancy.

I also have used the [H} site for many comparisons and great to hear that you retest with the latest drivers each time (I have a bad enough time doing this with just my system). Hat's off to you Sir

 

[FalseChristian]

If Anandtech had to redo the benchmarks after every driver update there wouldn't be and benchmarks at all, no?