GPU-Tech.org - Industry's first Open-CL-1.1-Driver is public: AMD Catalyst 10.10

Better late than never - that applies to me as well as to AMD. To me, because I am a few

AMD bundles Stream SDK with Catalyst 10.10

days late with this driver update and to AMD because they managed to keep their OpenCL driver hidden in some obscure SDK until now.
As it stands, AMDs Catalyst 10.10 WHQL drivers for Radeon graphics cards bring not only official support for OpenCL but also some other changes, one of them being another first-timer. Catalyst 10.10 is the driver to use, if you want to utilize your brand-new HD 6800 series card. Catalyst Hotfix 10.10a adds support for morphological anti-aliasing for HD 6800 (officially) and improves performance in a number of titles, most notably Starcraft 2 when using anti-aliasing. 10.10b is intended for use in the Windows XP environment for HD 6800 owners.

Here's the official download-site over at AMDs.

And below are the direct links - they might work or not though:

As the changelog says, there's been a number of performance improvements with this driver. The Aliens vs. Predator and Stalker Call of Prypjat Benchmark tools are up a few percent - do you also wonder, why only the benchmark and not the game itself? More importantly, AMDs software engineers found ways to improve Crysis Warhead, Battleforge and Uniginge Heaven (which is also only a benchmark) with Antialiasing enabled. Far Cry 2, Metro 2033 and World in Conflict are up single-digit percents too. There even is a Crossfire Profile for the Stonegiant application - you guessed it, another benchmark.

Things change
This has never been so true as for this driver. If you hate OpenCL for whatever reason, there's also versions without the necessary strings attached. Go grab them at AMD official download site yourself - i won't be helping such backward guys with linkage!

Further and more important, AMD has decided it would be time to offer greater flexibility to its customers and as of this driver release, you have a slider under the Catalyst AI header in order to select the level of optimizations applied to textures (in games mainly).

I will cite the passage, AMD gave in its Reviewer's Guide for HD 6800 series cards, as has been posted by Damien Triolet over at Beyond3D.com:

The Texture Filtering Quality slider has three settings – High Quality, Quality (default), and Performance. The High Quality setting disables all texture optimizations. The Quality setting enables a trilinear optimization as well as an anisotropic sample optimization, which are designed to have no visible impact on image quality while offering improved performance. The Performance setting enables more aggressive versions of these optimizations that offer further performance improvement, but may have a small impact on image quality.

The AMD Radeon HD 6800 series continues to support fully angle invariant anisotropic filtering, and incorporates further improvements in LOD precision relative to the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series. These image quality benefits come with no additional performance cost and remain enabled at all Texture Filtering Quality settings.

When comparing performance and image quality against NVIDIA products, we recommend using the same Texture Filtering Quality setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel to ensure the most direct and fair comparison. However, note that as of this writing NVIDIA products do not offer a comparable anisotropic filtering option with full angle independence.

So, with the slider set to High Quality (or „Hohe Qualität” as it is called in german) your precious Radeon graphics card will filter at its highest possible ability. It's too bad, AMD forgot to mention at the 6800 series' launch that they adjusted the driver default for image quality compared to HD 5800 series. What once was AI standard is now High Quality, whereas the drivers' default setting is Quality, which equals the former AI advanced - or so you can interpret what AMDs Dave Baumann says (and it's actually been confirmed more explicit by AMD directly). Thus, many reviews out there, which weren't putting equal drivers on all cards to the test, are more or less comparing apples and oranges. In a not purely synthetic fillrate test I did on a HD 6870, the difference between Quality and High Quality was the former being roughly 28 percent faster. Now, this is an extreme case, but it should give you some perspective on the potential implications of these so called optimizations.

Background and useful links regarding AMD Catalyst driver
If you are into open standards as AMD is, you should try installing the Ati Stream SDK 2.2. Beta support for OpenCL 1.0 is available for Radeon HD 4890, 4870 X2, 4870, 4850 X2, 4850, 4830, 4770, 4670, 4650, 4550, 4350. The general support in the Stream SDK 2.2 is true as well for the corresponding FirePro and Radeon Mobility variants.

• Ati Stream SDK 2.2 Windows XP 32 bit
• Ati Stream SDK 2.2 Windows XP 64 bit
• Ati Stream SDK 2.2 Windows 7/Vista 32 bit
• Ati Stream SDK 2.2 Windows 7/Vista 64 bit
• Ati Stream SDK 2.2 Linux 32 bit (openSUSE 11.2, Ubuntu 10.04/9.10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5/5.4)
• Ati Stream SDK 2.2 Linux 64 bit (openSUSE 11.2, Ubuntu 10.04/9.10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5/5.4)

For all you part-time historians and archivars, AMD keeps their old drivers for quite a while at their site.

• Archived Catalyst Drivers for Vista/7 x86 (8.1 - 10.9)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for Vista/7 x64 (8.1 - 10.9)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for XP x86 (8.1 - 10.9)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for XP x64 (8.1 - 10.9)

AGP owners get a hotfix
Also, there's the special page for the now inofficial AGP-versions of the drivers. God knows why they're not worthy of a WHQL-sign any more (my guess it's cost-related…). Anyway, here they are:

Legacy Driver for Radeon 9500/9700 series to X1950 series
For all you brave souls hanging onto your trusty Radeon 9x00, X300, X550, X600, X700, X8x0, X1K, X2100 and Radeon Xpress Integrated Graphics, there's hope. Sometimes, when the stars' constellations are aligned just right, a new driver for the officially no longer supported graphics chipsets is spawning at the following sites:

• Catalyst Legacy-Drivers for X1K and older cards for Vista/7 x86 (currently: 10.2)
• Catalyst Legacy-Drivers for X1K and older cards for Vista/7 x64 (currently: 10.2)
• Catalyst Legacy-Drivers for X1K and older cards for XP x86 (currently: 10.2)
• Catalyst Legacy-Drivers for X1K and older cards for XP x64 (currently: 10.2)

Overview about supported standards and functionality
And now for the "GPU-Tech.org added value", I am promising to deliver. Here's the supported standards and tech for most of the recent desktop Radeon cards (with Catalyst 10.7 drivers) - something that's not very well documented on the web, not to speak of being crammed into one single place.

Radeon HD 6870/6850 (Barts based):

• DirectX 11 (Compute Shader 5.0, 4.1, 4.0) and lower,
• OpenGL 4.0
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• OpenCL 1.1
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)
• FMA (at 4/5th speed), triangle-setup at full speed

Radeon HD 5970 (Cypress based):

• DirectX 11 (Compute Shader 5.0, 4.1, 4.0) and lower,
• OpenGL 4.0
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• OpenCL 1.1 (single-gpu mode only)
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)
• Double Precision (at 1/5th speed), FMA (at 4/5th speed), triangle-setup at full speed

Radeon HD 5870/5850/5830 (Cypress based):

• DirectX 11 (Compute Shader 5.0, 4.1, 4.0) and lower,
• OpenGL 4.0
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• OpenCL 1.1
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)
• Double Precision (at 1/5th speed), FMA (at 4/5th speed), triangle-setup at full speed

Radeon HD 5770/5750 (Juniper based):

Radeon HD 5670/5650/5570 (Redwood based):

Radeon HD 5450 (Cedar based):

Radeon HD 4890/4870/4850/4830/4730 (RV770/790 based):

• DirectX 10.1 (Compute Shader 4.1, 4.0) and lower,
• OpenGL 3.2
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• OpenCL 1.0
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)
• Double Precision (at 1/5th speed)

Radeon HD 4770 (RV740 based):

Radeon HD 4670/4650 (RV730 based):

• DirectX 10.1 (no Compute Shader though) and lower,
• OpenGL 3.2
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• OpenCL 1.0
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)

Radeon HD 4550/4350 (RV710 based):

• DirectX 10.1 (no Compute Shader though) and lower,
• OpenGL 3.2
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• OpenCL 1.0
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)

Radeon HD 3870/3850 (RV670 based):

• DirectX 10.1 (no Compute Shader though) and lower,
• OpenGL 3.2
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• no OpenCL
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)
• Double Precision (at 1/5th speed)

Radeon HD 3650 (RV635 based):

• DirectX 10.1 (no Compute Shader though) and lower,
• OpenGL 3.2
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• no OpenCL
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)

Radeon HD 3470/3450 (RV615 based):

• DirectX 10.1 (no Compute Shader though) and lower,
• OpenGL 3.2
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• no OpenCL
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)

Radeon HD 2900 XT/Pro/GT/OEM (R600 based):

• DirectX 10 (no Compute Shader though) and lower,
• OpenGL 3.2
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• no OpenCL
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)

Radeon HD 2600 XT/Pro (RV630 based):

• DirectX 10 (no Compute Shader though) and lower,
• OpenGL 3.2
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• no OpenCL
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)

Radeon HD 2400 XT/Pro (RV610 based):

• DirectX 10 (no Compute Shader though) and lower,
• OpenGL 3.2
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• no OpenCL
• Ati Stream (now called AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing or just AMD APP)

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AMD packs (industry's first) official OpenCL 1.1 into Catalyst 10.10 (Update: various Hotfixes, now at 10.10e)

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