The AMD Catalyst™ Preview Driver that you have been waiting for!
First of all, I would to thank Jay Marsden
for doing an excellent job informing the community about the latest AMD
Catalyst™ releases past year and a half. Jay has now handed the
AMD Catalyst™ duties over to me, and I’m looking forward to continuing
the momentum that he has built with “AMD at Play”.
Now for the news you all have been waiting for!
By now you should know that we recently launched the world’s fastest graphics card1, the AMD Radeon™ HD 6990. You may also have heard that we were preparing a pretty wicked driver release. But there’s something you probably haven’t heard: the AMD Catalyst™ 11.4 Preview Driver is that wicked release!
A history of improvement
Now, for those who don’t recall, we launched the AMD Radeon™ HD 6870 with AMD Catalyst™ 10.9. Here in our labs, we pitted that combination against the same GPU and the AMD Catalyst™ 11.4 Preview Driver and came up with the results below. Your experience will vary based on your resolution, system configuration and other settings, but we’re pretty excited about the possibilities.
- Up to 70% performance improvement in Civilization V
- Up to 49% performance improvement in Call of Duty: Black Ops
- Up to 12% performance improvement in F1 2010
- Up to 21% performance improvement in Wolfenstein MP
- Up to 15% performance improvement in Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X
- Up to 17% performance improvement in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
- Up to 28% performance improvement in Metro 2033
- Up to 33% performance improvement in Left 4 Dead 2
- Up to 26% performance improvement in FarCry 2
- Up to 22% performance improvement in Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Up to 18% performance improvement in Aliens vs. Predator
But owners of the AMD Radeon™ HD 6870 aren’t the only ones who will see performance improvements. The entire AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 and HD 6900 Series should similarly benefit from the work we have put into their drivers since launch.
By now you’re probably wondering how the Preview Driver stacks up against our most recent release, AMD Catalyst™ 11.2. We raised our baseline image quality in 11.2, so the performance improvements going to the 11.4 Preview should be pretty small, right? Wrong. Based on various configurations, resolutions and settings, our internal data still shows pretty amazing improvements!
- Up to 23% performance improvement in Aliens vs. Predator
- Up to 22% performance improvement in Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Up to 15% performance improvement in Battleforge
- Up to 72% performance improvement in Civilization V
- Up to 59% performance improvement in Call of Duty: Black Ops
- Up to 26% performance improvement in FarCry 2
- Up to 35% performance improvement in Lost Planet 2
- Up to 30% performance improvement in Metro 2033
- Up to 11% performance improvement in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
- Up to 19% performance improvement in Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
And one more thing: the AMD Catalyst™ 11.4 Preview Driver (and its official release in April) is only the first in a series of planned drivers that we hope will provide even more performance throughout 2011.
For now, however, we think it’s time to get in on the action by downloading the driver right here.
NOTE: This preview driver is only available for Windows® 7.
Christopher Bell is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
1 As of February 20, 2011, the AMD Radeon™ HD 6990 scores X3303 in 3DMark® 11, the highest single graphics card score achieved to date.
Christopher can you get the team to do something adding a setting for a HDMI/DP manual audio path switch in the driver?
For example, I cannot describe how frustrated it is when I power up my Displayport connected Dell U2711 monitor before my AV receiver (HDMI) after idling for a while. ATI HD audio device will see DP is capable of audio, and change channel. I then get no sound from my HDMI output UNTIL I restart my PC.
I know Microsoft is also at fault with this, along with useless ‘syncing’ feature with the new DP and HDMI digital interfaces. I don’t want to know my HDMI cable is unplugged and ALL my other screen flickers. Can’t we go back to thigns like DVI? So simple.
Will this fix the black exterior views in Silent Hunter 5 with a 5970? if not can you get it fixed as the 11.3 has made the game unplayable.
Having issues with Blu-Ray playback on PowerDVD 10 and 11 with the preview driver, is AMD aware of there being any issues with these drivers at all or is it just my system?
I noticed that the 11.4 drivers are supposed to improve the Eyefinity group handling. I’m not sure about anybody else, but when I upgraded to 11.3 from 11.2, I am no longer able to make Eyefinity groups. When I try, all monitors but my primary get a distorted mirror image of my first monitor. I hope 11.4 fixes this.
Good job on the performance improvements.
Will this fix the lag that’s caused by 11.3 drivers when playing resident evil 5 mercenaries mode?
How about fixing profiles for multi-monitors? I’m sick of having to manually reconfigure my setup in CCC to have 1 display group, then go back to 3 x spanned desktops each time I want to play a game…