First post, by pixel_workbench
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While looking into suspiciously low performance of my Radeon HD graphics cards, I stumbled on a nasty surprise - newer Catalyst drivers for Windows XP are slower than older ones, sometimes much slower. I tested several games and benchmarks from about the 2007 - 2009 time period, and you can see the results in the charts below. The test rig was a Core2 Duo e7300 system, running Windows XP SP3. All tests were run at 1920 x 1080 resolution.
The Radeon HD 4890 performs the best with the oldest driver I tested - Catalyst 10.2, and it's all downhill from there. The latest official XP driver Catalyst 13.1 performs the worst.
Things are looking better for the Radeon HD 5770, and Catalyst 10.2 through 12.4 perform about the same. But the last XP driver 14.4 again causes noticeably lower performance.
The Radeon HD 6950 actually saw an improvement going from Catalyst 11.5 to 12.4. Unfortunately with Catalyst 13.4 and later it also suffers a big drop in performance.
And lastly, we have the Radeon HD 7970. While it appears that performance is more or less the same, except for Fallout 3, the newer drivers actually cause much higher GPU utilization for no good reason. So it's likely that the card was a lot more CPU limited with the earlier drivers, and would also see a decline with newer drivers. This is something I'll have to test in the near future.
This also means that the first generation GCN cards (7970, 7870, and the 7870 rebadged as R9 270x) are preferable over the later GCN cards (7790, R7 260x) for XP gaming because you can use the earlier 12.4 driver.
UPDATE
Added additional results in a post below, this time using a newer LGA2011 test rig.
Re: AMD Catalyst drivers for Windows XP - newer is NOT better
For additional details and commentary, you can read about it on my website here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
