GPU-Tech.org - Official Catalyst 10.11 are out - un-recommended for enthusiasts and HD6800 owners

AMD have released the november issue of their Catalyst Driver suite or rather the eleventh iteration this ye

Catalyst 10.11 comes with AMD branding for the first (official) time

ar, named Catalyst 10.11 accordingly. Great change has come with this driver as it is the first official WHQL driver for Radeon cards to bear the AMD signature. As a result of those tremendous changes, you'll see some new logos and artwork when installing the driver - that's perfectly normal, so do not be afraid, you're still keeping the same card you love so dearly.

The version numbering for the different parts of the complete Catalyst 10.11 driver package looks like this:

Catalyst Version 10.11
Open GL ICD 6.14.10.10317
Direct3D Driver 8.14.10.0791
Direct2D Driver 8.01.01.1094
Catalyst Control Center 2010.1105.19.41785
Packaging 8.791-101026a-107888C-ATI

Things change - but not this time
You should understand that these enormous changes left not much headroom for anything else. For example support for the rather nice post-processing edge blur filter called MLAA on HD 5870 or the new Catalyst user interface including the improved AI texture quality slider I have reported on here and here. While were at it, MLAA is not supported on HD 6850 or HD 6870 either, in fact those cards aren't supported at all. Makes you wonder why release a new driver then? Well, there are some performance improvements, if you're into playing Battleforge on your HD 5870(s) without antialiasing enabled or if you just love to immerse yourself in the Stalker - Call of Pripyat Benchmark - but see below. Some more bugfixes were included, which is more important anyway than a performance improvement nobody would notice (and that's not me being ironic or cynical!) - here they are for Windows 7 / Catalyst 10.11 combo:

Running fullscreen DirectX 9 applications/games after enabling Aero effects and rebooting no longer causes the system to randomly stop responding
Running fullscreen DirectX 9 applications/games after enabling Aero effects and rebooting no longer causes the system to randomly stop responding
Primary display no longer blanks out intermittently during "World in Conflict: Soviet Assault"DirectX10 gameplay with CrossFire and Dual Monitor enabled
Stone Giant DirectX 11 demo no longer intermittently fails in fullscreen mode with CrossFire enabled under Multi-GPU configurations on some cards
Task switching out of "Battlefield: Bad Company™ 2 and then back into the game no longer causes CrossFire to become disabled
Enabling in-game Anti-Aliasing and utilizing Edge-Detect filters no longer causes smoother lines but blurry textures when compared to the Standard filter on some cards
Desktop line corruption is no longer observed after hotplugging the HDCP display on some cards
Enabling Overdrive through the Catalyst™ Control Center for single display systems no longer results in GPU clocks running at high levels in non-GPU intensive scenarios

I've highlighted the change that might be quite important to some enthusiasts out there, since it's been demanded to be fixed for quite a while now.

All in all this new official Catalyst driver is so non-thrilling for enthusiast users, that even Catalystmaker Terry Makedon himself recomm ends the earlier 10.10e Hotfix (which in fact is newer with regard to it's 3D core) to non-average users. That's why I've kept the link listed in addition to the official Catalyst 10.11 WHQL drivers.

Catalystmaker recommends 10.10e over 10.11 for enthusiasts

Without further adue, here's the official download-site over at AMDs and below are the direct links - they might work or not though:

The changelog - for the first time as HTML page and not PDF, so there's no linkage, but a saved version of the HTML attached - says, Battleforge performance is up "up to 3 percent" for HD 5870 single and Crossfire X. Further improvements have been observed by AMD in the Stalker - Call of Pripyat benchmark, again for solo HD 5870 and a multiple of those cards. That makes me wonder again, why only the benchmark and not the game? Well, at least it looks nicer now in performance reviews of the card.

The Catalyst Application Profiles fix negative crossfire scaling in Nostradamus (never heard of that, but more cudos for AMD nee Ati for fixing it nevertheless) and they do not let you enable anti-aliasing through the CCC any more (I suppose it's for your own good).

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 (8.10 - 10.10)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for Vista/7 x64 (8.10 - 10.10)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for XP x86 (8.10 - 10.10)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for XP x64 (8.10 - 10.10)

Radeon with AGP interface - Hotfix awaits
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 - no change, still at 10.2
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 - 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)

Sections

Categories

Useful Links

Tag Cloud

Official Catalyst 10.11 are out - un-recommended for enthusiasts and HD6800 owners

Rate this article