Just a small newspost to point out how much the AMD Catalyst drivers have improved performance in the 3DMark11 performance benchmark. Back in January, when the Radeon HD 7970 was launched, AndreYang broke the 3DMark11 Performance Single GPU record scoring 15063 points with the graphics card clocked at 1700/1990 and his Sandy Bridge-E 3960X clocked at 5637 MHz. This result was done with the Catalyst 11.12 drivers.

Today, German overclocker Donkel submitted a score of 15083 points, about twenty points higher than AndreYang's original record. This score was done with much, much lower clock frequencies, though. In fact, whereas AndreYang had to use liquid nitrogen on both CPU and GPU, Donkel uses an all-water cooled system. The clock frequencies? Only 1360/1990 MHz on the graphics card and an Ivy Bridge 3770K at 5000 MHz.

So, essentially AMD improved their drivers so much over the past year that we can now get the same performance on watercooling as we had with liquid nitrogen about 11 months ago. Impressive!