AMD Releases Catalyst 13.1 Drivers

AMD has released its first new driver suite this year, the Catalyst 13.1 WHQL driver set. As we are used to seeing from driver improvements, the new 13.1 drivers feature a number of performance improvements, focused on the HD7000 series graphics cards. All of the performance improvements found in the 12.11 Beta drivers are featured in the 13.1 driver suite. Performance improvement numbers below are respective to the performance from Catalyst 12.10.

Performance gains seen on the entire AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series:
All game were tested at high / extreme / ultra levels

  • Enhanced performance in Far Cry 3 (up to 25% with 8xMSAA, SSAO enabled @ 1600p, and up to 15% with 8xMSAA, HDAO enabled @1600p) (AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 must also be installed)
  • Enhanced AMD CrossFire scaling performance in Call of Duty Black Ops 2
  • Up to 10%-15% more performance in Battlefield 3 in most cases
  • Up to 7% more performance in Metro 2033
  • Up to 10% more performance in DiRT Showdown
  • Up to 8% more performance in Sleeping Dogs
  • Up to 12% more performance in Civilization V
  • Up to 10% more performance in StarCraft II
  • Up to 8% more performance in Sniper Elite: V2
  • Up to 5% more performance in Max Payne

AMD Catalyst Mobility 7970M performance for AMD Enduro technology supported platforms has been improved for DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications:

  • 3DMark 06: Up to 6%
  • 3DMark Vantage: Up to 15%
  • 3DMark 11: Up to 12%
  • AvP: Up to 11%
  • Battlefield 3: Up to 25%
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops: Up to 13%
  • Crysis 2: Up to 45%
  • DiRT Showdown: Up to 62%
  • ETQW: Up to 8%
  • Hard Reset: Up to 8%
  • Just Cause 2: Up to 90%
  • Mafia 2: Up to 40%
  • The Chronicles of Riddick: Up to 4%
  • Shogun 2: Up to 56%
  • StarCraft 2: Up to 25%
  • Skyrim: Up to 45%
  • Sniper Elite V2: Up to 60%
  • Tom Clancy’s HAWX: Up to 56%
  • Unigine Heaven: Up to 33%
  • Wolfenstein: Up to 9%

For more information on the Catalyst 13.1 driver suite, head here.

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Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

  • jerm1027
    "Releases" makes it sound like it's news; these drivers have been out for almost a week... How about changing the title to reflect that?
    "AMD released Catalyst 13.1 drivers"
    Reply
  • myromance123
    No mention of the Linux release notes? Why not?
    For those really interested in tech:
    http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst131ProprietaryLinuxGraphicsDriverReleaseNotes.aspx

    Most important is to note that XServer 1.13 is now officially supported.
    Reply
  • rpmrush
    Ya this isn't news when everyone already has them installed. And the title is bogus... at least Anandtech used the terminalology "available" and they released their article on the 18th. "Released" would at least make note the you are not in the present with this aritcle.
    Reply
  • Trying to think of an excuse why news are coming between 2 and 10 days later on Tom's hardware than any other self-respecting site, First i was like "Ok maybe they check facts, editor needs to check the stuff" and so on, but lately i think they use pigeons for their news flashes.
    Reply
  • Pherule
    Best news I've had all day.
    Reply
  • A Bad Day
    Late news is late. In fact, Techreport already ran a test determine if the 13.2 Beta fixes the 7950's stuttering issues (which it does): http://techreport.com/review/24218/a-driver-update-to-reduce-radeon-frame-times
    Reply
  • COLGeek
    Installed. Working as advertised. Seems like a good release. Installed both desktop and mobile versions, several days ago...
    Reply
  • blackmancer
    Perhaps retitle

    "AMD Releases Catalyst 13.1 Drivers 4 days ago"
    Reply
  • omnimodis78
    Another sub par driver release! 13.1 is plagued with problems, and all this after what, 11 beta releases? AMD fails again. I am so happy I jumped ship a few months back. Reintroduction of bugs which were fixed recently; not recognizing systems (though previous beta are fine); major micro-stuttering; packing 32bit files into 64bit release and vice versa; etc. AMD definitely should not have laid off the good engineers and offloaded software development to junior staff.
    Reply
  • A Bad Day
    omnimodis78 TROLOLOLOL I WANT TO BE FLAMED
    My friend's desktop was bricked after he installed a driver update for the GTX 680. After undoing the damage, any registry cleaners we ran simply froze. Windows Update wouldn't work properly either.

    In short, either your computer is messed up and needs a nice nuking and reinstall, or you'er just blatantly lying.
    Reply