AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta Released: What It Fixes and Improves

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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84 Comments Comment from the forums

expl0itfinder

Right now the performance increases are (realistically) spotty at best. However, they did say they are aware of the issues, and I can't wait for further optimization.
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Mousemonkey

From the threads and post I've seen it seems to break more than it fixes.
Reply
Mousemonkey

12599204 said:
12599168 said:
From the threads and post I've seen it seems to break more than it fixes.

Hence the reason it is a beta...

A beta that got held back because it had issues and yet gets released with issues, good job Mantle didn't get released back in December isn't it?
Reply
10hellfire01

I'm sure the kinks will be worked out with time, give or take a few years. Reminds me of the good ol' Glide days. Although I still can't make my mind on if Nvidia will respond in some manner or if they don't see the need to (many seem to be going with the latter). Still don't think Mantle will make as much a dent in the market as many have hoped.
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.
Typo there: Rome 3 doesn't exist.
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Morbus

This is the reason I left ATI and went for a GTX760... I don't regret it in the slightest.
Reply
thor220

This is the reason I left ATI and went for a GTX760... I don't regret it in the slightest.
You left because you hate getting performance boosts for free? Well I guess you're better off with Nvidia then. I'm sure they love to take your money for things that should be free.
Reply
Mousemonkey

12599574 said:
This is the reason I left ATI and went for a GTX760... I don't regret it in the slightest.
You left because you hate getting performance boosts for free? Well I guess you're better off with Nvidia then. I'm sure they love to take your money for things that should be free.

I think he's referring to the crappy drivers which have always been a feature of ATi drivers and now seem to be an AMD thing since they bought the company.
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Sourdoughx

Don't understand the AMD disdain. If you don't like the company and like Nvidia - great. But if you can't see the benfit in a company releasing an API still in it's infancy, first utilized by a medicore developer (my personal opinion of DICE), which offers FREE performance improvement that increases longevity of your GPU/CPU...you're looking at the glass half empty. Me, I'd rather use my AMD card (which surprisingly still plays games w/o Mantle!), and wait to see if other developers are smart enough to dedicate some time to optimize their game for an API that obviously offers users increased performance. If they don't - oh well. We're stuck with DirectX and buying video cards every two years for that little bit of Clock speed until the World burns up and we're all scavenging for a can O' beans.
Reply
childofthekorn

12599596 said:
Don't understand the AMD disdain. If you don't like the company and like Nvidia - great. But if you can't see the benfit in a company releasing an API still in it's infancy, first utilized by a medicore developer (my personal opinion of DICE), which offers FREE performance improvement that increases longevity of your GPU/CPU...you're looking at the glass half empty. Me, I'd rather use my AMD card (which surprisingly still plays games w/o Mantle!), and wait to see if other developers are smart enough to dedicate some time to optimize their game for an API that obviously offers users increased performance. If they don't - oh well. We're stuck with DirectX and buying video cards every two years for that little bit of Clock speed until the World burns up and we're all scavenging for a can O' beans.

Yeah just bash-to-bash in the name of fanboism. I especially love the fact they're bashing something in BETA. Same type of facepalm that comes from people complaining about performance issues in a game thats in beta, and how the game shouldn't be released, when they bought-in to a game just to play BETA.
Reply
Mousemonkey

12599596 said:
Don't understand the AMD disdain. If you don't like the company and like Nvidia - great. But if you can't see the benfit in a company releasing an API still in it's infancy, first utilized by a medicore developer (my personal opinion of DICE), which offers FREE performance improvement that increases longevity of your GPU/CPU...you're looking at the glass half empty. Me, I'd rather use my AMD card (which surprisingly still plays games w/o Mantle!), and wait to see if other developers are smart enough to dedicate some time to optimize their game for an API that obviously offers users increased performance. If they don't - oh well. We're stuck with DirectX and buying video cards every two years for that little bit of Clock speed until the World burns up and we're all scavenging for a can O' beans.

The problem is that AMD's PR hyped the crap out of this API and claimed that it has been in the works for a couple of years and before the release of BF4 they said it would be ready in December of last year, so when it turns up late and buggy why shouldn't people question it?
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