AMD Catalyst Omega 14.12 Driver Performance with Frame Times in CrossFire

Far Cry 3

Far Cry 3 is an open world first-person shooter video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It is the sequel to 2008’s Far Cry 2. The game was released on December 4th, 2012 for North America. Far Cry 3 is set on a tropical island found somewhere at the intersection of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. After a vacation goes awry, player character Jason Brody has to save his kidnapped friends and escape from the islands and their unhinged inhabitants.

Far Cry 3 uses the Dunia Engine 2 game engine with Havok physics. The graphics are excellent and the game really pushes the limits of what one can expect from mainstream graphics cards. We set game title to 2x MSAA Anti-Aliasing and ultra quality settings.

Far Cry 3 appears to be like most of the other games we are using to test video cards and uses up about 20% of the processor and is running on multiple cores.

Benchmark Results: The AMD Radeon R9 290 CrossFire setup averaged 79.19 FPS with Catalyst 14.9 drivers and 81.51 FPS with the latest Catalyst Omega video card drivers. It looks like we got a modest 2.9% performance improvement with the Catalyst 14.12 drivers versus 14.9.

Benchmark Results: Some small variations here and there, but no big frame drops on any of the cards to report back about. We noted six dips on our benchmark run and they are there with both drivers, so no big improvements there. These dips are not present when one is using a single-GPU, so it is just something that happens on Far Cry 3 when one is using multiple discrete graphics cards.

Benchmark Results: The standard deviation with Catalyst 14.9 drivers was 2.82 and it was found to be 2.43 with Catalyst Omega drivers. This is a 14% improvement in frame times, which is pretty substantial! If you look at the six slow downs or dips that we noted when looking at the previous FPS chart they go along perfectly with the spikes we are seeing in the frame times. These spikes are notably lower with the Catalyst Omega drivers.