AMD Catalyst 12.11 Driver Performance Never Settle - Article

AMD Radeon Catalyst 12.11 Performance - Never Settle Game Bundle

AMD is getting ready for the holiday season and as such has launched the Never Settle Marketing campaign. In this article we test the new 12.11 Catalyst driver (part of that campaign), the new driver has had some TLC from AMD, improving overall performance on a number of games. Next to that AMD is launching their Never Settle Game Bundle, purchase a R7000 series dedicated card and you can get some great free game(s).

We'll start off with that game bundle first, during the upcoming months when you decide to purchase a Radeon HD 7700/7800 or 7900  series graphics card AMD is going to give away free games alongside your purchase. These will be downloadable games.

The Never Settle Game Bundle

So if you purchase a new Radeon HD 7700/7800 or 7900 card you can get one or multiple new games for free (downloadable). The titles are:

• Sleeping Dogs
• Hitman Absolution
• Far Cry 3
• Medal of Honor Warfighter (discount only)

The game bundle versus purchase has been setup like this:

• Purchase a Radeon 7700 or 7800 series card and you'll receive Far Cry 3 for free.
• Purchase a Radeon 7900 series card and you'll receive Far Cry 3, Hitman absolution, and Sleeping dogs

However .. if you plan to purchase two or more 7700/7800 series cards for your multi-GPU freak on:

• Purchase two Radeon 7700 or 7800 series cards and you'll receive Far Cry 3 and Hitman absolution. Next to the free games for all graphics card purchases you can also use/get a 20% discount for Medal of Honor WarFighter (that's next to the free games of course).

So especially the 7900 series deals are pretty sweet as you receive three top game titles for free.

The new AMD Catalyst 12.11 Driver

Now AMD has been working hard on a new driver as well. And we have been quite fond of it during our preliminary tests. 

The past few months the driver team has been working on a series of driver optimizations. Interestingly enough, most games that we tested show some sort of performance increase, that's throughout the Guru3D software suite. The optimizations are for the GCN architecture based products only meaning Radeon 7000, the Radeon 6000 series will not benefit from the performance tweaks.

But next page please where we'll talk about that a little more.