The Interesting Tale Of AMD's FirePro Drivers
With the X-Plane 9 flight simulator running on the FirePro hardware, the performance across the Catalyst drivers was flat. The frame-rate in Catalyst 9.2 was much higher than all drivers since, but that was due to the Catalyst 9.2 driver not rendering X-Plane correctly.
The FirePro V8700 could not even handle running the more recent Unigine Engine until the Catalyst 9.6 release. Even with Catalyst 9.6 though there were some rendering problems and an abnormal frame-rate, Catalyst 9.7 then resulted in Unigine crashing, but the Unigine issues were then worked out in Catalyst 9.8. Since Catalyst 9.8 through Catalyst 10.12, the performance has been largely the same with only a slight rise in performance.
Lastly, with Unigine Tropics, there were the initial problems as well until Catalyst 9.8 was released, but with this more demanding tech demo, there were some frame-rate improvements in late 2009, some small regressions in 2010, and relatively unchanged frame-rates since this summer.