Whilst synthetic benchmarking tools and Square Enix's Thief 4 have canned benchmarks neither Far Cry 4 nor Assassins Creed Unity offer the same luxury. In order to generate repeatable results we navigated to positions in game where reliably repeatable 2-minute snippets of gameplay where possible. Frame per second results were then averaged, providing us with an overall result for that title.
The dual synthetic benchmark results for Cinebench RC15 and 3DMark Firestrike indicate that Catalyst Omega includes performance optimisations similar to 14.9.2beta for these specific applications. That's to be expected - leaps in general GPU performance for a driver base this mature is unlikely, whilst scenario-specific optimisations are still possible for relatively new or untested conditions.
Our Thief 4 benchmark played out roughly as expected - Catalyst Omega's performance was very close to that of 14.9.2beta.
Coupled with Thief 4's numbers these results speak of something core to modern driver updates – they often don’t provide across the board performance improvements to games, but instead roll in a number of jumps for specific games where rendering can be streamlined whilst not impacting image quality. Take Thief – released in February, the 14.9.2beta driver already incorporates all of the driver-level improvements uncovered over the last ten months; as such, there’s no real step forward in performance for this title. This contrasts well with both Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed Unity, which both saw a hefty >5% improvement due to their post-14.9.2beta release.
So in conclusion, don't expect miracles from Catalyst Omega unless you're running on drivers released prior to your game of choice, but equally you shouldn't expect performance to degrade in the transition.
The dual synthetic benchmark results for Cinebench RC15 and 3DMark Firestrike indicate that Catalyst Omega includes performance optimisations similar to 14.9.2beta for these specific applications. That's to be expected - leaps in general GPU performance for a driver base this mature is unlikely, whilst scenario-specific optimisations are still possible for relatively new or untested conditions.
Our Thief 4 benchmark played out roughly as expected - Catalyst Omega's performance was very close to that of 14.9.2beta.
Coupled with Thief 4's numbers these results speak of something core to modern driver updates – they often don’t provide across the board performance improvements to games, but instead roll in a number of jumps for specific games where rendering can be streamlined whilst not impacting image quality. Take Thief – released in February, the 14.9.2beta driver already incorporates all of the driver-level improvements uncovered over the last ten months; as such, there’s no real step forward in performance for this title. This contrasts well with both Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed Unity, which both saw a hefty >5% improvement due to their post-14.9.2beta release.
So in conclusion, don't expect miracles from Catalyst Omega unless you're running on drivers released prior to your game of choice, but equally you shouldn't expect performance to degrade in the transition.
