ATI Catalyst 7.10 offers big CrossFire performance boost

AMD send PC Perspective the new Catalyst 7.10 driver which will be released later this month. The firm claims this driver will offer a big boost in gaming performance in DX10.

Seriously though, after the publication of our review, AMD contacted me about an updated Catalyst driver, version 7.10, that I was told would dramatically change the results of our testing. Of course, I could have told them to go stick it, as the review reflected the status of AMD's GPU performance as of that date, and it did. But I knew that AMD deserved another chance at it, just as I constantly am getting new drivers from the green team (brighter green at least) throughout product launches and lifespans.

So, after receiving an early copy of the 7.10 "Shoot-em-up" driver as it somehow seems to have been named, I set out to spend my weekend doing some MORE graphics testing.

Check it out over here. The reviewer found that the improvements with a single card aren't really spectacular, but when you drop in a second card in CrossFire the performance boost is pretty big. Looks like CrossFire support is improving a bit:

In all of our games we saw notable improvements in the scaling of CrossFire and in some cases turned a negative performance gain into a strong positive one. In Bioshock we saw a 54% gain in CrossFire performance, in Company of Heroes we saw a 73% gain and in World of Conflict a 93% gain. The other two titles, Call of Juarez and Lost Planet, which already had CrossFire scaling with the 7.9 driver, still saw improvements of 9% and 20% respectively when tested with the new Catalyst 7.10 drivers.