AMD Catalyst Omega 14.12 Driver Performance with Frame Times in CrossFire
Battlefield 4
Battlefield 4 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) and published by Electronic Arts. It is a sequel to 2011’s Battlefield 3 and was released on October 29, 2013 in North America. Battlefield 4’s single-player Campaign takes place in 2020, six years after the events of its predecessor. Tensions between Russia and the United States have been running at a record high. On top of this, China is also on the brink of war, as Admiral Chang, the main antagonist, plans to overthrow China’s current government; and, if successful, the Russians will have full support from the Chinese, bringing China into a war with the United States.
This game title uses the Frostbite 3 game engine and looks great. We tested Battlefield 4 with the Ultra graphics quality preset as most discrete desktop graphics cards can easily play with this IQ setting at 1080P and we still want to be able to push the higher-end cards down the road. We used FRAPS to benchmark with these settings on the Shanghai level. All tests were done with the DirectX 11 API unless noted in the chart.
Battlefield 4 is more CPU intensive than any other game that we benchmark with as 25% of the CPU is used up during gameplay. You can see that six threads are being used and that the processor is running in Turbo mode at 3.96GHz more times than not.
Benchmark Results: In Battlefield 4 with Ultra settings at Full HD 1080P resolutions we found that there was not a significant difference between Catalyst 14.9 and Catalyst Omega (14.12) drivers. In fact, we found slightly better performance with Catalyst 14.9 drivers on this game title if you get right down to it. Not like you’ll be able to tell a 0.34 FPS difference though when you are gaming at an average of 136FPS!
Benchmark Results: The AMD Radeon R9 290 CrossFire setup ran BF4 pretty smoothly and never dropped below 110 FPS.
Benchmark Results: When looking at the Frame Times we did found a standard deviation of 1.72 on the Catalyst Omega (14.12) drivers versus 1.92 on the older Catalyst 14.9 drivers. This goes to show that while the average FPS didn’t really change the time it took to render the frames improved by nearly 10.5% and this helps smooth out the gaming experience so you have less micro stutters.