Cat 10.3a Preview (yes, "a") said to be released tomorrow. Now with Moar AWESOME!

[alexsubri]

Just testing it last night. I got ~65-90 FPS while i was playing BFBC2! 10.2 gave me a solid 60!

Also I noticed that my cards are running cooler! Really nice touch (also games load a lot faster)

I highly recommend 10.3a especially if you have crossfire

[Black Panther]

It worked great for me!

I got nearly 200 more points in Unigine Heaven, and 7fps more on average

Nice.

[fullinfusion]

Great going to run some tests myself,

[sweeper]

epic fail on my system. Lost 300+ on 3DMARK06 ... back to the 10.2's again.

[Mussels]

people still care about 3dm06?

[sweeper]

What else am I suppose to use? There is Vantage, 06, Unigine Heaven, Tropics, ????

[Mussels]

games? play them?

[fullinfusion]

I ran RE5 benchmark and got a lower score, I than ran Heaven Bench and scored noticeably higher, I tried Dirt 2 Bench and got the bsod before the mark started lol
I found out it was a profile I had changed so all is good now.

Just ran Dirt 2 bench and WOW what a difference!!!!

Time to game now!

[sweeper]

Hmmm.... Heaven didn't bench any better. Actually started to skip and jerk frames. Running the 10.2 drivers it's back to smooth and nice.

[fullinfusion]

Originally Posted by sweeper

Hmmm.... Heaven didn't bench any better. Actually started to skip and jerk frames. Running the 10.2 drivers it's back to smooth and nice.

well I'm running stock settings on cpu and gpu and got marks of this in Heaven benchmark DX11...

CCC 10.3 Preview
fps 60.7/ score 1529

CCC 10.3a
fps 65.7/ score 1654

and both tests are running a screen res of 1920x1080...

I think these drivers are for the 5xxx series gps's bro.... the 4 series have no more to give sense the 10.2 cat's.... there performance has been max'd already.

[20mmrain]

Anyone getting any weird results in Crysis with these drivers. They seem to have given me a nice boost in the game as well as everything else. But in Crysis only these drivers seem to have made to game some what a little unstable. For example sudden frame rate drops?

Just asking I am going to reinstall the game real quick it could be something else but I figured I would just ask.

But besides that.... these drivers are a god send!!! A+ ATI...... I can't wait for the final edition!

Looks like the GTX 480 should start shaking after these drivers!

[Zenith]

I have experience with 10.2 vs 10.3. In TDU I have got nice FPS increase.

[Lionheart]

Seems like most ppl are experiencing better performance and some are experiencing issues!

[Blacklash]

Heaven bench gained +5FPS. Went from 41FPS @ 1920x1200 DX11 to 46FPS. That's a single HD 5870 @ 1030|1300. It was run with default filtering at the indicated res. That's 10.2 vs 10.3a.

I'll try DiRT2 later.

EDIT:

BTW Some have been saying they've been having trouble OCing with these. I haven't. For folks having trouble OCing with these try the old version of MSI's Afterburner. I'm still using 110 with AMD's GPU Tool and I have zero problems overclocking my 5870. I boost voltage with Afterburner, apply clocks with AMD's GPU Tool then kick up the fan with Afterburner. Works flawlessly every time.

[FreedomEclipse]

how long before 10.3/10.4's are released?? my 3d tab in CCC is now defaulting to optimal or custom settings every time i reboot (i have it on quality mode) & even when i do force it to quality I dont think it still applys the settings. which would explain why I see more fps in games - because the card is working less harder on textures & more on rendering.

[sweeper]

Originally Posted by fullinfusion

well I'm running stock settings on cpu and gpu and got marks of this in Heaven benchmark DX11...

CCC 10.3 Preview
fps 60.7/ score 1529

CCC 10.3a
fps 65.7/ score 1654

and both tests are running a screen res of 1920x1080...

I think these drivers are for the 5xxx series gps's bro.... the 4 series have no more to give sense the 10.2 cat's.... there performance has been max'd already.

I believe you are correct. I think they are now optimizing drivers for the 5XXX series cards now. I run my system with the CPU OC'd and everything else stock. Guess I was hoping to see the increase the 5xxx's were getting.

[Lionheart]

Originally Posted by Blacklash

Heaven bench gained +5FPS. Went from 41FPS @ 1920x1200 DX11 to 46FPS. That's a single HD 5870 @ 1030|1300. It was run with default filtering at the indicated res. That's 10.2 vs 10.3a.

I'll try DiRT2 later.

EDIT:

BTW Some have been saying they've been having trouble OCing with these. I haven't. For folks having trouble OCing with these try the old version of MSI's Afterburner. I'm still using 110 with AMD's GPU Tool and I have zero problems overclocking my 5870. I boost voltage with Afterburner, apply clocks with AMD's GPU Tool then kick up the fan with Afterburner. Works flawlessly every time.

Hey man, sweet overclock on ya card, just wondering what voltage are you running at for the GPU core and did you have to increase you memory voltage for the 1300MHZ?

[Asylum]

I saw no increase in 3Dmark Vantage with the 10.3a from 10.3.
The numbers are almost exact.

[Blacklash]

Originally Posted by CHAOS_KILLA

Hey man, sweet overclock on ya card, just wondering what voltage are you running at for the GPU core and did you have to increase you memory voltage for the 1300MHZ?

No I didn't need extra voltage for the mem. My card isn't the best compared to some out there.

I can do 1000 on stock volts, 1030 takes 1.3. I did try setting the volts all the way up to 1.35 just to see how far I could go. My core will run @ 1050 max. 1060 = freezing after a while.

Of course, I'm using the stock cooler. I'm not sure if water cooling would do anything for me.

The difference between 1050|1300 and 1000|1250 are as follows on my rig in the heaven bench with the 10.3a driver @ 1920x1200 using default filtering DX11; 46.8 vs 44.9.

[Steevo]

Originally Posted by Blacklash

No I didn't need extra voltage for the mem. My card isn't the best compared to some out there.

I can do 1000 on stock volts, 1030 takes 1.3. I did try setting the volts all the way up to 1.35 just to see how far I could go. My core will run @ 1050 max. 1060 = freezing after a while.

Of course, I'm using the stock cooler. I'm not sure if water cooling would do anything for me.

The difference between 1050|1300 and 1000|1250 are as follows on my rig in the heaven bench with the 10.3a driver @ 1920x1200 using default filtering DX11; 46.8 vs 44.9.

Temps made a 40Mhz difference for me at the same voltage. I was running 1010 at 1.29 and now am at 1058 stable, and with 1.35 I have managed a run at 1105.

At this high speed there seems to be certain core/memory frequencies that work best, I get freezes in Heaven if I have clocks at 1058/1330 but it runs fine at 1070 and 1330, but furmark bombs out.

I start furmark in windowed mode, use GPUz to check temps, Afterburner to set clocks and voltages, and ATItool to test for errors. Make sure to watch your FPS as too high of a memory clock causes a drop in performance, and then hardlockups beyond that.

[Blacklash]

Originally Posted by Steevo

Temps made a 40Mhz difference for me at the same voltage. I was running 1010 at 1.29 and now am at 1058 stable, and with 1.35 I have managed a run at 1105.

At this high speed there seems to be certain core/memory frequencies that work best, I get freezes in Heaven if I have clocks at 1058/1330 but it runs fine at 1070 and 1330, but furmark bombs out.

I start furmark in windowed mode, use GPUz to check temps, Afterburner to set clocks and voltages, and ATItool to test for errors. Make sure to watch your FPS as too high of a memory clock causes a drop in performance, and then hardlockups beyond that.

Interesting.

1050 is completely doable on my card, I just have to keep the fan on blow dry when I game

WC and approaching a possible 1090 is tempting. I did try 1070 on air with the stock cooler and the heaven bench freezes after 20secs.

With my memory I lose performance past 1300.

I recognize just because someone else got +40MHz with WC does not mean I will.

[afw]

Hey I dont know whether you guys saw this ... http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/31...sis/index.html

10.3s shows some excellent gains ... ... sweet ...

[Lionheart]

Originally Posted by Blacklash

Interesting.

1050 is completely doable on my card, I just have to keep the fan on blow dry when I game

WC and approaching a possible 1090 is tempting. I did try 1070 on air with the stock cooler and the heaven bench freezes after 20secs.

With my memory I lose performance past 1300.

I recognize just because someone else got +40MHz with WC does not mean I will.

Why does the performance get worse when you go past 1300Mhz on the memory, is it the type of GDDR5 memory they are using and aren't designed for that speed or could it be the 256bit memory interface holding it back?

[nt300]

Originally Posted by CHAOS_KILLA

Why does the performance get worse when you go past 1300Mhz on the memory, is it the type of GDDR5 memory they are using and aren't designed for that speed or could it be the 256bit memory interface holding it back?

It sounds like the memory is getting unstable because of heat and speed. 256-bit sould be more than enough imo.

What I propose ATi do for next GPU is a dual set of 256-bit memory interfaces and not a single larger 512-bit. If they can soemhow make the new GPU memory quad-channel or Octa-channel, it might remove todays bottleneck and increase speed while increasing bandwidth something the GPUs lack today.

I notice more bandwidth does not always mean better performance in games with both ATI and Nvidia gpus.

[nt300]

MY Rumoured HD 6800 series Specifications:

- Much more programmable via Drivers
- ALU:TEX ratio is going to increase by 2x
- Going to be more than 32 pixels per clock (Maybe 64 pixels per clock)
- Ray Tracing highly emphasized
- 32nm process but 28nm process is now rumoured
- 1 GPU comprised of 4 smaller GPU’s in one (Multi-GPU package)
- 1.10 GHz GPU Core Speed
- Quad-Channel 256-Bit (4 x 128-Bit per CPU)
- 4000 Stream Processing Units (1000 per mini GPU = 4 x 1000)
- 160 Texture Units
- 256 Z/Stencil ROP Units
- 32 Color ROP Units
- Highly Complex, highly scalable GPU processing device.

This is what I think, how about you?