AMD Releases Catalyst 13.11 Beta 6 Driver
AMD has posted its new Catalyst 13.11 Beta6 driver, which brings support for the new Radeon R9 290X graphics card.
Following the release of its new Radeon R9-290X graphics card (see our review here), AMD has posted its new Catalyst 13.11 Beta6 driver. The driver is still in the Beta phase, but using the new hardware is required. Of course, it still carries support for the older hardware as well.
The biggest highlight of the driver is the added support for the new Radeon R9 290X graphics card. It also brings support for the R9 290, though that card has yet to be released. In addition, AMD has also added automatic EyeFinity configuration as well as automatic plug and play configuration for UltraHD/4K tiled displays.
As always, the driver also comes with a roundup of performance improvements which are listed below:
- Batman: Arkham Origins - improves performance up to 35% with MSAA 8x enabled
- Total War: Rome 2 - improves performance up to 10%
- Battlefield 3 - improves performance up to 10%
- GRID 2 - improves performance up to 8.5%
- DiRT Showdown - improves performance up to 10%
- Formula 1 2013 - improves performance up to 8%
- DiRT 3 - improves performance up to 7%
- Sleeping Dogs - improves performance up to 5%
The driver is available for download here, and supports Windows 7, 8, and 8.1.
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why don't they support my GPU from 2007?!
Still creating random profile files that don’t work? Check.
Main display still black after waking up from power saver? Check.
Windows still get all messed up if you turn off displays or turn one on? Check.
Maybe someday.
There is B7 now
Here:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx
why don't they support my GPU from 2007?!
Nvidias current driver that came out today still supports back to the Geforce 8 series like the 8800 gt that was released in 2006. So if you want 7+ years of driver updates then it looks like the green team is the better bet.
Still creating random profile files that don’t work? Check.
Main display still black after waking up from power saver? Check.
Windows still get all messed up if you turn off displays or turn one on? Check.
Maybe someday.
Thx for the information.
Last driver corrupted my system pretty bad: After power save ticked in I couldn't get an image at all (screen stayed black). In the last few driver versions the PC would just restart if that was the case. This time I had to manually restart, with the result that my system froze within seconds in windows everytime I restarted.
In safe-mode I couldn't remove the AMD driver (because gfx-drivers don't load in safe mode, meaning CCC just closed itself as it found no hardware). Luckily I have an onboard gfx-card which I had to enable to boot the PC in normal windows and then remove the AMD driver.
After 1 hour of restarting and system freezes I will never try out an AMD beta-driver again.
I have an annoying soundbug that makes it impossible to play games with sound (extremely loud static noise) which is just a dirver problem as it went away a few times after the driver crashed and restarted. This problem isn't solved for nearly 10 months now, instead the new drivers lead to 1 hour time sinks of restarting my PC... the definition of bad support.
This is my first and last AMD gfx-card.
Still creating random profile files that don’t work? Check.
Main display still black after waking up from power saver? Check.
Windows still get all messed up if you turn off displays or turn one on? Check.
Maybe someday.
Thx for the information.
Last driver corrupted my system pretty bad: After power save ticked in I couldn't get an image at all (screen stayed black). In the last few driver versions the PC would just restart if that was the case. This time I had to manually restart, with the result that my system froze within seconds in windows everytime I restarted.
In safe-mode I couldn't remove the AMD driver (because gfx-drivers don't load in safe mode, meaning CCC just closed itself as it found no hardware). Luckily I have an onboard gfx-card which I had to enable to boot the PC in normal windows and then remove the AMD driver.
After 1 hour of restarting and system freezes I will never try out an AMD beta-driver again.
I have an annoying soundbug that makes it impossible to play games with sound (extremely loud static noise) which is just a dirver problem as it went away a few times after the driver crashed and restarted. This problem isn't solved for nearly 10 months now, instead the new drivers lead to 1 hour time sinks of restarting my PC... the definition of bad support.
This is my first and last AMD gfx-card.
Wow all this while using a BETA driver? Who knew? Also this post should be sent to AMD since it is a driver that is still work in progress. Talking about driver bugs everywhere else other than to AMD doesn't help to fix jack.
why don't they support my GPU from 2007?!
Nvidias current driver that came out today still supports back to the Geforce 8 series like the 8800 gt that was released in 2006. So if you want 7+ years of driver updates then it looks like the green team is the better bet.
Yet even though the driver supports the 8000 series NVidia GPUs, it does not mean any of the fixes or optimizations are for that series GPUs. AMD used to do it to but when the GPUs don't see any major benefit, what's the point?
And as well, if you have a 7 year old GPU it is time to upgrade.
I've also got another annoying issue with any version newer than 13.4 stable. I'm using Classic Shell on Windows 8.0 and Honeyview image viewer. Opening my list of recently viewed documents on the start menu is MUCH slower than with the 13.4 stable driver. I sure hope this issue will be fixed by next stable release.
tl;dr looks like black screen issues are fixed (for me at least)