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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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.
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.
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?
I've seen the figure of 8 million dollars being bandied about.
BTW, I am a mod and I prefer ATI GPUs and am running a HD 7970 so your generalization is a pretty big failure.
Mantle requires the developer to program the game engine for the API, much like DX or OGL. It isn't just something AMD turns on in the driver package.
Well it is when Nvidia give money to a company to use PhysX so why can't AMD be held to the same rules?
No one is saying it is a POS. I never did but rather there is no incentive for other devs to program for it. If a new game dev came out during the 360 vs PS3 and were new with little funds do you think they would opt to code for the 360, which was a much more simple build on PC them port to 360, or the PS3, which had to be coded for specifically?
My point is that while Mantle does show performance improvements, it only does so for people with a very weak CPU backing up a very strong GPU and only for a very small market share currently. If Microsoft adds in the same feature to DX12 do you think devs will stick with something they are familiar with or will they spend more time and money developing for a new API?
Companies do not think in terms of performance for the masses but rather what it will cost to develop, support and patch said title and how much they will make. If they add another API to its list of support that means more people to pay to support said title and thus less revenue.
I am all for more performance but so far the previews are showing Mantle as almost pointless for enthusiasts who will have higher end CPUs and only good for those who have lower end CPUs and for some reason decided to buy a really high end GPU.
My point about the cost of the 290/280 series is not to say Mantle sucks more but rather that the GPUs that support, or will support Mantle, are out of reach for the common person as most people will not spend $700 on a single GPU let alone $400-$500 for a GPU that is 2 years old (7970/280X) thus the market share for those that can actually utilize Mantle is still very small.
And I doubt that a person who is going to pay the $700 for a 290X (no I don't count the stock ones as no one wants those compared to the Tri-X or DCUII) is going to only spend $100-$150 on a mid range at best CPU. Rather they are going to buy a i5/i7 or FX CPU to fit their enthusiast mind set, much like I have always gone with higher end CPUs with higher end GPUs. Thus again the market share where Mantle will benefit people is again smaller.
Again I am all for better performance and utilizing the power of a GPU, which a 7970 still has some to give but Mantle right now is nothing to go crazy about and if Microsoft adds in the same abilities into DX12 then I doubt it will go anywhere as devs will stick with what they know rather then spend money on something new.