The Catalyst 10.3 drivers were hailed to be the drivers that fully unlocked the potential of the HD5000 series. Of course, the sceptics in the community believed that ATI were holding back performance on purpose waiting till Nvidia launched their Fermi graphics cards to deliver another blow to them. But for the most part, the performance improvements ATI claimed were fairly conservative with only DIRT 2 advertised as gaining a massive 20% boost. Unfortunately I didn't run the DIRT 2 benchmarks on the older drivers for comparisons.

Looking at our results though, we see a general improvement with the latest 10.4 drivers, which has retained the performance increase from the 10.3 drivers. On the whole it ranged from 3-6% in Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead, Street Fighter IV and Resident Evil 5. There was a slight drop in Quake Wars and Unreal Tournament but this wasn't significant at all, given the already high FPS. 3DMark Vantage and the Unigine demo also saw a rise in performance. The most important observation was the fact that the DX11 benchmark showed some impressive gains suggesting that ATI have been optimising the DX11 performance and their tessellation engine.

So there we have it, ATI have done a tremendous job to constantly extract performance from the cards. Of course, I have to emphasise that the HD5800 series of cards delivered excellent results even at launch and the performance we see today is a welcomed bonus. Their dedication to release monthly drivers also has to be commended for the effort that goes into doing so. Most importantly however, drivers are not merely tools to occasionally raise performance in games but they ensure compatibility with all the latest software as well as issue bug fixes. After all, that is their primary function and what we see in terms of FPS gains should be considered an additional benefit.