The new driver has had some TLC from AMD, improving overall performance on a number of games. AMD's Never Settle Catalyst 12.11 driver will be available as a non-WHQL beta. A WHQL version will follow later on in November.

We have a review on this driver in this article and you can discuss the driver in this thread.

Opposed to the previous driver releases the team has been able to boost overall game performance throughout the 7000 series with 5% and up-to 20%, so that's quite significant.

Here’s the full set of notes for the latest driver:

 (Please note that AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta11 includes all of the fixes found in previous versions of AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta)

• Improves performance in Far Cry 3 (up to 25% with 8xMSAA, SSAO enabled @ 1600p, and up to 15% with 8xMSAA, HDAO enabled @1600p) (AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 must also be installed)
• Resolves a sporadic system hang encountered with a single AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPU seen on X58 and X79 chipsets.
• Resolves an intermittent hang encountered with AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs in a CrossFire Eyefinity setup.
• Resolves image corruption found in certain DirectX 9.0c titles
• Resolve missing fonts issue in XBMC
• Resolves no video issue found in Media Player Classic Home Cinema when using full or half floating point processing
• Resolves stability issues found in the previous AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta8 driver for Linux
  • For users experiencing issues with HDMI Audio under Ubuntu 12.04, users should try installing the “dkms-hda - 0.201211291615~precise1” package from  https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-audio-dev/+archive/alsa-daily/+packages and reboot; this will resolve the HDMI Audio issue found in Ubuntu 12.04
• AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 has just been released, and should be used in conjunction with AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta11
  • Improves Far Cry 3 performance for single GPU configurations with AA enabled

The key take away is that if you’re playing Far Cry 3 – you need both AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta11 and AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 installed.

FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE AMD CATALYST 12.11 BETA DRIVER:

This driver introduces significant performance improvements for many games across ALL 28nm AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series products: HD 7700, HD7800 and HD7900. 

Performance Highlights of the AMD CATALYST 12.11 BETA Driver

• 10%-15% more performance in Battlefield 3 in most cases
  • More than 20% in certain missions and sequences (Comrades)
• Up to 7% more performance in Metro 2033
• Up to 10% more performance in DIRT Showdown
• Up to 8% more performance in Sleeping Dogs
• Up to 12% more performance in Civilization V
• Up to 10% more performance in StarCraft II
• Up to 8% more performance in Sniper Elite: V2 
  

Resolved issue highlights of AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta Driver

• Medal of Honor:  Warfighter; AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta4 resolves an application crash found when running in AMD CrossFire mode with Anti-Aliasing enabled (This issue was observed in the AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta3;  The AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta4 has replaced the AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta3 driver that was posted Oct 22 2012).
• Resolves performance issues (where GPU activity runs at lower values than expected) seen on the AMD Radeon HD 7870
• AMD Catalyst Mobility 7970M performance for AMD Enduro™ Technology supported platforms has been substantially improved for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications. An updated driver for 7970M users featuring AMD Enduro™ Technology with additional DirectX 9 performance improvements will be released soon.
  • 3DMark Vantage – Up to 15%
  • 3DMark 11 – Up to 12%
  • AvP – Up to 11%
  • Battlefield 3 – Up to 25%
  • Crysis 2: Up to 45%
  • DiRT Showdown – Up to 62%
  • ETQW – Up to 8%
  • Hard Reset – Up to 8%
  • Just Cause 2 – Up to 90%
  • The Chronicles of Riddick – Up to 4%
  • Shogun 2 – Up to 56%
  • Sniper Elite V2 – Up to 60%
  • Tom Clancy’s HAWX – Up to 56%
  • Unigine Heaven – Up to 33%
  • Wolfenstein – Up to 9%

But as stated throughout the scope of game titles you should be able to notice significant enough performance increases. The performance increases can be as little as a few percent, on average however we see an up-to 10% performance increase and in a case of two the performance benefit even reached roughly 20%