ATI Catalyst 10.3a Driver Performance Benchmarking

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance
benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and
DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests,
several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware. 3DMark
Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed
specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API
from Microsoft.

The Extreme settings were used for testing, so a resolution of 1920×1200 was used.

Benchmark Results: ATI claimed that CATALYST 10.3a
drivers improves performance up to 8% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
products over the previous driver. Our results showed a 1.4% performance
improvement, but if you look back to the original 9.9 drivers we used to benchmark the Radeon HD 5870 you’ll notice that we have gained nearly 1000 3DMarks by driver updates alone. Having an 11% performance improvement in 3DMark Vantage scores over the past six months by just updating your driver is nice to see!