3DNN

AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5800 series was launched just over nine months ago. Since then, AMD has been true to its word releasing new driver updates every month. Our question is, "Have we seen driver performance improve since launch?" Certainly drivers updates and performance increases have traditionally gone hand in hand, and we have seen some mighty performance boosts with the latest NVIDIA drivers. Now we want to see how far along the Radeon HD 5870 has come since its first install into our PCIe slots.

One of the concerns about any card launch is that drivers are immature and may not be allowing the full potential of performance with the video card. We always hear this common phrase: "give it some time, and newer drivers will improve performance." Well, here we are nine months later and while performance has generally improved, it isn’t as earth shattering as one would hope though. This is good news in one way, as the driver and performance we showed at launch is still relevant today in some games and it seems AMD came out of the gate swinging with a really solid driver to begin with. On the other hand, it is also kind of disappointing not to see some drastic improvements by now. Of course, there are some improvements, but none allow us to change our gameplay settings or experience compared to the launch drivers. I think game patches, such as those in Aliens vs. Predator and DiRT 2 have done more for performance than drivers alone.