GPU-Tech.org - Catalyst 11.2 WHQL brings new features: MLAA for all DX11 Radeons, Tessellation control now official and new texture optimizations

The Catalyst driver suite for AMDs Radeon line of graphics accelerators have been updated to version 11.2 WHQL. As promised, those bring quite a bit of change for the tech savvy of you: Morphological filtering for all DirectX 11 capable Radeon cards, Tessellation control at the users hands and a revamped texture optimization slider.

The version numbering for the different parts of the official Catalyst 11.2 driver package looks like this.

Catalyst Version 11.2
Open GL ICD 6.14.10.10524
Direct3D Driver 7.14.10.0812
Direct2D Driver 8.01.01.1123
Catalyst Control Center 2011.0126.1749.31909
Packaging 8.821-110126a-112962C-ATI

Morphological filtering, a driver imposed post-processing effect, has been extended to all Radeon cards of the DirectX 11 generation, HD 5450 and up that is. The filter is also available under the Windows XP operating system. This is good news, as it can double as nice antialiasing surrogate in case neither game nor driver can enable regular multi- and supersampling. Also, the already talked about Tessellation control switch has been included in the driver and it works as I've already described in an older article. And last but not least, the Texture Optimizations under the Catalyst AI umbrella has been reworked. Like before, the High Quality setting provides native quality of the TMUs. The quality setting according to AMD and the best of my knowledge only imposes a reduction of the amount of trilinear filtering that is done between mipmap levels and is quite similar in fact to what Nvidia is using for DirectX 9 applications.

I have done a comparison of the filtering quality with the new optimizations in place, as well as a small benchmark showing the performance difference in PowerVRs Villagemark Benchmark, which previously has been shown as an extreme case of filtering optimization affecting performance.

First, here is the Image quality comparison. I used the well known Half Life 2 which has quite a few places with very highly defined textures, making attempts to save on the 16x AF filtering visible. From left to right, there is a comparison of High Quality versus Quality on my HD 5870 using Catalyst 11.2 drivers, the same with Quality versus performance and for cross-reference, an Nvidia GTX 480 running Geforce 266.58 WHQL drivers and HQ vs. Q also. Please note that black dots indicate an bit-matched identical rendering output, while white dots show a difference of at least one bit.

HD 5870 on Catalyst 11.2 WHQL highlighting differences between High Quality and Quality settings

HD 5870 on Catalyst 11.2 WHQL highlighting differences betweenQuality and Performance settings

Geforce GTX 480 (266.58 WHQL) highlighting differences between High Quality and Quality settings

You can easily see that the difference on the Radeon between High Quality and Quality and thus the level of texture filtering reductions closely resembles that of the Geforce card. While this doesn't change the fact that the Radeons' TMUs are more prone to exhibit texture shimmering, it clearly shows that AMD has taken back some of the overly aggressive saving mechanism employed in earlier drivers. The Performance setting does use a mild blur achieved through a slightly positive LOD bias starting from Mip-leve 2 in this case. This also helps to reduce the shimmering, but reduces texture sharpness along as well - I guess there's one death to die either way.

Performance-wise, the new texture filtering optimizations (which indeed are optimizations compared to the raping of textures of previous drivers are netting the following results in PowerVRs Villagemark Benchmark (please note, that the number are the achieved fill rate in 2.048x1.536 resolution and not fps!)

Performance implications of the texture filtering optimizations in Catalyst 11.2 WHQL drivers on an HD 5870

Additionally, I wanted to see how the tessellation and it's supression affects the score on the popular DirectX 11 benchmark 3DMark 11 from Futuremark (there should be a youtube video in the sidebar, in case you don't know it yet):

Effects of the Tessellation Control switch in Catalyst 11.2 WHQL drivers and 3DMark 11

The whole list of improvements is posted over at AMDs Release Notes website and here's a small excerpt:

• Call of Duty: Black Ops: Performance increases up to 11% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing enabled
• Batman Arkham Asylum: Performance increases up to 4% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Series single configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.

The new and improved Catalyst Control Center is only available for Windows Vista (updates required: .NET Framework 3.51) and Windows 7 as is the case with the Tessellation control switch, which could be used in XP environments for OpenGL-based tessellation. Morphological filtering and the new Texture Filtering is available as well in Windows XP as it is in Vista and 7. As always you can go over to AMDs official download-site or use the links below - they might work or not though:

Background and useful links regarding AMD Catalyst driver
1. AMD App SDK 2.3
If you are into open standards as AMD is, you should try installing the AMD App SDK 2.3 formerly known as Ati Stream SDK 2.3 and literally still known as such; it is only the webpage that makes use of the new name at the time of this writing.

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 2.3 is true as well for the corresponding FirePro and Radeon Mobility variants. With version 2.3, AMD is supporting their upcoming Fusion-APUs C- and E-series in OpenCL as well as the Radeon HD 6900 based on the new Cayman chip, double precision calculations are still limited to the CPU as I only get a „not supported” message when trying to run them on my HD 5870.

Ati Stream SDK 2.3 Windows XP x86
Ati Stream SDK 2.3 Windows XP x64
Ati Stream SDK 2.3 Windows 7/Vista x86
Ati Stream SDK 2.3 Windows 7/Vista x64
Ati Stream SDK 2.3 Linux x86 (openSUSE 11.3, Ubuntu 10.04/9.10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5/5.4)
Ati Stream SDK 2.3 Linux x64 (openSUSE 11.3, Ubuntu 10.04/9.10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5/5.4)

2. Archived Drivers - for the bug-ridden of you
For all you part-time historians and archivars, AMD keeps their old drivers for quite a while at their site.

3. 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:

4. Legacy Driver for Radeon 9500/9700 series to X1950 series: 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 6970/6950 (Cayman based):

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

Radeon HD 6870/6850 (Barts based):

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

Radeon HD 5770/5750 (Juniper based):

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

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, short 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, short 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, short 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, short 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, short 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, short 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, short 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, short 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, short APP)

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Catalyst 11.2 WHQL brings MLAA for all DX11 Radeons and new texture optimizations, makes Tessellation control official

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