The Interesting Tale Of AMD's FirePro Drivers
SPECViewPerf 10's sw-01 has the same findings as some of the SPECViewPerf 9 results where the 2010 optimizations are only restoring the performance to where the V8700 performed originally with Catalyst 9.2.
Knowing very well now about the workstation OpenGL performance for the FirePro V8700 over the past two years, the rest of the results look at other non-WS specific areas. With the Lightsmark OpenGL lighting benchmark, there was a slight improvement in performance in late 2009, but overall the performance was not very shaky and there were no 2010 "optimizations" to be found. With Catalyst 10.12 the Lightsmark frame-rate is up by 11% compared to Catalyst 9.2.
While most owners of expensive FirePro graphics cards will not be using it to run open-source games, with the DarkPlaces-powered Nexuiz game the performance only slightly matured like in Lightsmark. There was though a significant drop in performance from Catalyst 10.1 through Catalyst 10.5.