In anticipation of its new flagship GPUs, AMD is releasing a set of graphics drivers that makes some major changes to the Catalyst formula.
Historically, one of the biggest complaints levelled at the Catalyst team had to do with the slow update schedule. While NVIDIA was cranking out ForceWare releases on an almost weekly basis, AMD has been stuck shipping out monthly releases, which often meant that gamers were left with drivers that weren't optimised for the latest titles.
This got a little better with the introduction of the Catalyst Application Profiles (CAPs), but even they were few and far between. Now the company is committing to weekly CAP releases, which should be a huge boon for fans of the latest games - especially if they have CrossFire set-ups. Frustratingly, it doesn't look they'll be pushed out through Steam, but most enthusiasts probably prefer to manually update their drivers anyway.
GamersNexus: "Catalyst Omega introduces direct competitors to NVIDIA technology (like DSR, seen here), offers greater Linux support, and hosts a suite of media playback smoothing options. We'll look into all of those here, along with some driver benchmarks."
AnandTech: "In an off year that hasn’t seen too many new product releases thus far, this has been anything but a dull time. For the better part of a year now the technology journalist community – spearheaded by The Tech Report’s Scott Wasson – has been investigating the matter of frame pacing and frame timing on GPUs. In applying new techniques and new levels of rigor, Scott found that frames were not being rendered as consistently as we had always assumed they were, and that cards that were equal in performance as measured by frame rates were not necessarily equal in in performance as measured by frame intervals. It was AMD in particular who was battered by all of this work, with the discovery that both their single-GPU and multi-GPU products were experiencing poor frame pacing at times. AMD could meet (and beat) NVIDIA on frame rates, only to lose out on smoothness as a result of poor frame pacing."
Maximum PC: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) promised performance gains of up to 15 percent with its Catalyst 12.11 driver, which the company announced in conjunction with its "Never Settle" game bundles. Our own evaluation of the driver update using a Radeon HD 7970 yielded mostly minor framerate bumps compared to Catalyst 12.8, though performance did improve in the majority of games and benchmarks we tested it with. If you're interested in grabbing the new driver package, it's now available to download, albeit in beta form.
