Posted on Monday, December 12 2005 @ 12:45 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
AnandTech took an ATI Radeon 9700 PRO video card and compared the performance of this card in a couple of benchmarks and games with the Catalyst 3.00 to 5.11 drivers.
That said, when the optimizations, the tweaks, the bug fixes, and the cheats are all said and done, just how much faster has all of this work made a product? Are these driver improvements really all that substantial all the time, or is much of this over-exuberance and distraction over only minor issues? Do we have any way of predicting what future drivers for new products will do?
Today, we set out to answer these questions by taking a look back at a piece of hardware whose time has come and is nearly gone: ATI’s R300 GPU and the Radeon 9700 Pro.
You can check out the performance differences over
here. In most cases the game performance stayed roughly the same, although benchmarks like 3DMark seemed to profit a little bit more.
