AMD Catalyst Driver 11.5 supports Radeon HD 6790 and brings new Video Control Panel plus 11.5a Hotfix for Brink performance and compatibility

AMD's driver department seems to long for a prolonged vacation this year, so they bolted down the new Catalyst Driver Suite 11.5 WHQL in record time in the first third of the month already and uploaded them on their servers. The announcement on their download site should be live any minute now. According to packaging and Catalyst Control Center timestamp, this WHQL-Driver for all HD-Radeons (yay! finally) capable of DirectX 10, 10.1 or 11, was finalized only two weeks after the official Mjölnir-Release. Unfortunately, this release can not compete in astonishing number in terms of performance increases with Mjölnir also, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. AMD's software engineers seem to have concentrated on fixing bugs and adding a new and improved control panel for the video section - I have a side-by-side comparison below (it's almost like I've had a hunch…).Here are the version numbers for May 2011:The whole list of improvements is posted over at AMD's release notes website (in zipped format attached in case the URL moves). As always you can go over to AMD's official download-site or use the links below - they might work or not though:As a zero-hour update, AMD already has the Hotfix 11.5a up, which fixes screen flickering in certain DX9-titles (such as Civilization V and others) for HD 6600 cards with DDR3-Memory. The same problem was already present in Catalyst 11.4 and also remedied with a separate hotfix. Furthermore, the Hotfix supposedly improves performance in id-Tech Engine based game Brink which is due any day now.Update May 15th, 2011:In the 11.5a hotfix driver, AMD has included an additional new video feature, or rather a preview of it. It is called AMD Steady Video and is located at the bottom of the Video Settings section. What exactly this new feature will do, is as greyed out as are the three sliders designated „Strength”, „Video Delay” and „Zoom” on my HD 5870. Probably though, this control could be utilizing the hardware's ALUs to achieve similar effects like MotionDSP's vReveal software, thus removing shakiness from crappy internet videos (or the ones you shot yourself without image stabilization turned on). Currently however you don't seem to get to see this new control at all if you just install the hotfix over the regular 11.5 WHQL driver set.




Background and useful links regarding AMD Catalyst driver
1. AMD App SDK 2.4
If you are into open standards as AMD is, you should try installing the AMD App SDK 2.4 formerly known as Ati Stream SDK. OpenCL 1.1 conformance is assured by AMD for basically all DirectX 11 conformant Radeons, meaning from the HD 5400 series up to the HD 6900 series with the exception of HD 6700 series which includes some renamed Juniper-based SKUs as well as the Barts salvage part HD 6790. Also - and quite curiously - the HD 6990, which with it's two-GPU-power of over 5 TFLOPS would be quite a nice computing device, is not supported as of the list posted on April 16th 2011 and additionally, HD 5970 is only supported in single-GPU mode.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 2.4 is true as well for the corresponding FirePro and Radeon Mobility variants. Since version 2.3 AMD is supporting their Fusion-APUs C- and E-series in OpenCL as well as the Radeon HD 6900 based on the 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.Please note, that as of this driver release, AMD has yet to unlock the use of their 64 kiB on-chip Global Memory for inter-SIMD communication with a separate OpenCL extension in order to unleash the full potential of their GPUs. GPU-Computing programmers will have to take this limitation into account for their work.As you may have noticed, separate versions for Windows XP are no longer offered. A footnote on AMDs developer website indicates that XP support is still included in the 32 and 64 Bit installers respectively; but that surely is a hint of a soon-to-be-announced discontinuance for Windows XP support in the APP SDK.
2. Archived Drivers - for the bug-ridden of you3. 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…).4. 10.2 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 little 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:
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 6990/6970/6950 (Cayman based):
Radeon HD 6870/6850/6790 (Barts based):Radeon HD 6770/6750 (Juniper based, renamed for OEM usage): Radeon HD 6670/6650 (Turks based):Radeon HD 6450 (Caicos based):Radeon HD 5970 (Cypress based):Radeon HD 5870/5850/5830 (Cypress based):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):Radeon HD 4770 (RV740 based):Radeon HD 4670/4650 (RV730 based):Radeon HD 4550/4350 (RV710 based):Radeon HD 3870/3850 (RV670 based):Radeon HD 3650 (RV635 based):Radeon HD 3470/3450 (RV615 based):Radeon HD 2900 XT/Pro/GT/OEM (R600 based):Radeon HD 2600 XT/Pro (RV630 based):Radeon HD 2400 XT/Pro (RV610 based):