AMD's Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers were supposed to arrive on Thursday, at the same time as the Mantle patch for Battlefield 4. Unfortunately, things were delayed a bit, and AMD had to work on the drivers through to the weekend. On Friday evening, the drivers were released to the press, despite there still being some installation issues. The good news is that these issues have been resolved and the drivers have been released for public consumption. You can download them via AMD's website. Users must uninstall the current driver before updating to Catalyst 14.1.
Catalyst 14.1 includes support for AMD's new A10-7850K and A10-7700K APUs and is necessary for users to see the benefits of the new Mantle API, which boosts performance in both Battlefield 4 and Star Swarm when running on R9 290 series cards. The Mantle beta driver is only supported on AMD's R9 and R7 series as well as its Radeon HD 7000 and 8000 series. AMD says Mantle performance for the Radeon HD 7000/8000 series and R9 280X and R9 270X GPUs will be optimized for Battlefield 4 in a future Catalyst release.
Mantle aside, you're looking at enhanced CrossFire frame pacing, including support for 4K and Eyefinity non-XDMA CrossFire solutions and dual graphics configurations. Resolved issues in this release include ground texture flickering in Total War: Rome 3 and flickering texture corruption in Call of Duty: Ghosts when playing multiplayer in the space station.
Check the complete list of resolved issues below:
- Ground texture flickering seen in Total War: Rome 2 with high settings (and below) set in game
- Flickering texture corruption when playing Call of Duty: Ghosts (multi-player) in the space station level
- Blu-ray playback using PowerDVD black screen on extended mode
- Streaming VUDU HD/HDX content on Sharp PN-K321 (DP) causes the right-side half to flicker in and out
- Black screen happened after wake up the monitor
- Full screen issue at rotation in DX9 mode
- Video window black screen when using Samsung Kies to play video
- Crysis2 negative scaling in outdoor scene
- Crysis2 has insufficient CrossFire scaling in some scenes
- Red Faction: The game has no or negative crossfire scaling with DX9 and DX11
- Age of Conan has corruption and performance issues with crossfire enabled
- Company of Heroes shadows are corrupted when using crossfire
- Resident Evil5's performance is unstable when display mode set to Window mode
- Total War: Shogun 2 flickering menu/text
- Frame rate drop when disabling post-processing in 3DMark06
- Negative Crossfire scaling with game "The Secret World" in DX11 mode
- F1 2012 Crashes to desktop
- Tomb Raider Hair Simulation Stutters on CFX
- Negative CrossFire scaling experienced in Call of Duty
- Battlefield 3 performance drop on Haswell systems
- Choppy video playback on 4k Video
- VSync ON Tearing with 2x1 Eyefinity SLS CrossFire
- Far Cry 3 - Game flickering while changing resolutions
- Display corruption and BSOD occurs when extending a display after disabling Multiple GPU SLS array
- Flickering seen when enabling three 4k x 2k panels at the same time
- No Video, just a black screen when setting Chrome to run in "High Performance" when playing certain video clips
- Image crashed on Starcraft game
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