ATI Catalyst Drivers On The HD 6970 – 11.1a/11.1/10.12 Compared

After our recent review of the ASUS HD 6970 and seeing the lackluster results that we were presented with, we decided to set out and give the 6970 another shot. Was it just another bad driver from AMD that seemed to have crippled the 6970, or was it in fact just the card itself that wasn't meeting our expectations? So what we have done is take the Catalyst 10.12 driver that we reviewed the card on and put them up against the new 11.1 WHQL and 11.1a Hotfix drivers that were released January 26th. We decided to use some of the benchmarks that were mentioned in the patch notes of the 11.1a drivers to run our tests. Hopefully, in this test we can get a little closer to figuring out if this card was just over hyped on exactly what it could do or if the drivers just neutered it. It should also be noted that this was not written to be a super in-depth look at the driver differences. We merely wanted to look at a few tests that were mentioned and see if we could find differences in the drivers performance, good or bad, and see if it has a chance of curing the 6970's prior mediocre showing. Read on…