AMD Catalyst Driver 11.8 with Overdrive for Black Edition CPUs, 30% faster MLAA [Update: CAP3 for Max Payne 3]

AMDs has put up it's Catalyst drivers 11.8 WHQL up for download. This time, they feature some nice performance improvements for DirectX 11 titles like Crysis 2 (up to 10 percent improved framerate) and F.E.A.R. 3 (up to 8 percent higher fps) as well as being up to 30% faster when performing AMDs Morphological Antialiasing.[Update: CAP3 provides many more game profiles, including crossfire improvements for Max Payne 3 - obviously nearing it's release.]
So far, it sounds exactly like the Catalyst 11.8 preview I've reported on earlier. But there's more:In addition to the improvements, it fixes image quality issues when paired with 11.7 CAP3!
Call of Duty: Black Ops is supposed to be 20 percent faster on HD 5000 and 6000 series of cards.

Additionally, AMD now includes CPU overclocking in the Performance section of the Catalyst drivers' Vision Engine Control Center provided that your system is powered by an AMD Black Edition CPU. There, you can enable or disable Overdrive as a whole as well as individually for your CPU and GPU. In CPU Overdrive you get a slider to adjust the Megahertz number your CPU runs on.

Since I only own an older Opteron 165, which being a workstation/server part originally doesn't qualify here, I can only provide those two pictures from AMDs newsletter showing the CPU overclocking controls.








Vision Engine Control Center is the Catalyst Control Centers' name as soon as you are running it on an all-AMD plattform.


The version numbers for AMDs Catalyst 11.8 WHQL look like this, indicating that the driver has been finalized on July 28th. Despite having a developer driver out already that supports OpenGL 4.2, the official 11.8 WHQL'ed version retains OpenGL 4.1 with the same 218 extensions that were previously supported.

• Catalyst Version 11.8
• Open GL ICD 6.14.10.11005
• Direct3D Driver 7.14.10.0855
• 2D Driver 8.01.01.1178
• OpenCL Driver 684.212
• CAL-Driver 1.4.1523 (VM)
• Catalyst Control Center 2011.0728.1756.30366
• Packaging 8.881-110728a-122939C-ATI

The list of fixed bugs include: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:

• Catalyst 11.8 WHQL (Windows XP, 32 Bit)
• Catalyst 11.8 WHQL (Windows XP, 64 Bit)
• Catalyst 11.8 WHQL (Windows 7/Vista, 32 Bit)
• Catalyst 11.8 WHQL (Windows 7/Vista, 64 Bit)
• Catalyst 11.8 WHQL Application Profiles Cap3 (all OS)

Note that as of this writing, a 11.8 CAP has not been released, making 11.7 CAP3 the most recent application profile update that you might want to install additionally in order to get the latest fixes.

[Update Sept. 6th 2011: Catalyst 11.8 CAP3 has been released and is ready for download. Next to improving performance for games like Warhammer 40k Space Marine and F1 2011 it includes an updated crossfire profiile for the upcoming Max Payne 3 as well as Deus Ex Human Revolution, L.A. Noire, Shaun White Skateboarding and Call of Juarez The Cartel. Unfortunately, AMD deemed it necessary to reduce the users' influence once again by disabling control panel anti-aliasing for F1 2011 and crossfire altogether for Serious Sam HD 1st and 2nd Encounter, Need for Speed World and Rome Total War.

The full changelog for Catalyst 11.8 CAP3 looks like this:

• Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Improves performance on Single GPU configurations
• War Inc Battle Zone: Resolves image corruption seen when enabling Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center
• Call of Juarez The Cartel - Improves CrossFire performance
• Rome Total War: Disables CrossFire support
• F1 2011:
  
  • Improves performance on Single GPU configurations
  • Forced on Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center has been disabled
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2 - Forced on Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center now works
• LA Noire - Improves CrossFire performance
• Need for Speed World – Disable CrossFire support
• Serious Sam HD : The First Encounter – Disable CrossFire support
• Serious Sam HD Demo: The First Encounter – Disable CrossFire support
• Serious Sam HD : The Second Encounter – Disable CrossFire support
• Deus Ex3: Human Revolution(DX9) - Improves CrossFire performance
• Shaun White Skateboarding - Improves CrossFire performance
• MaxPayne3 - Improves CrossFire performance]

Background and useful links regarding AMD Catalyst drivers

1. AMD App SDK 2.5
If you are into open standards as AMD is, you should try installing the AMD App SDK 2.5 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 August 3rd 2011 but finally, HD 5970 is supported in Dual-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 2.5 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. Starting with App SDK 2.5, double precision calculations are finally supported via cl_khr_fp64 extension - as of August 3rd 2011 for Cypress-based GPUs only.

• AMD APP SDK 2.5 Windows 7/Vista x86
• AMD APP SDK 2.5 Windows 7/Vista x64
• AMD APP SDK 2.5 Linux x86 (openSUSE 11.x, Ubuntu 11.04, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x)
• AMD APP SDK 2.5 Linux x64 (openSUSE 11.x, Ubuntu 11.04, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x)

The installed applications and tools include the APP profiler in version 2.3 and the Kernel Analyzer, which has just been updated to version 1.9. The release notes can be found as PDF on AMDs site; a blog entry from AMD highlights some more points of this APP-SDK release 2.5:

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 and the footnote on AMDs developer website that indicated XP support still being included in the 32 and 64 Bit installers respectively has disappeared. That seems to complete the discontinuance for Windows XP support in the APP SDK.Please note that the requirements for Linux versions have change also. For Ubuntu and Redhat you need versions 11.04 and 6.x respectively.

2. Archived Drivers
For the bug-ridden of you who might need to roll back to earlier Catalyst versions AMD has support pages up and running with archived Catalyst drivers from version 8.10 (yes, October 2010 that is) untill the most recently relieved ones.

• Archived Catalyst Drivers for Vista/7 x86 (8.10 - 11.7)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for Vista/7 x64 (8.10 - 11.7)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for XP x86 (8.10 - 11.7)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for XP x64 (8.10 - 11.7)

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…).

• Catalyst 11.8 AGP-Hotfix (Windows XP x86)
• Catalyst 11.8 AGP-Hotfix (Windows XP x64)
• Catalyst 11.8 AGP-Hotfix (Windows 7/Vista x86)
• Catalyst 11.8 AGP-Hotfix (Windows 7/Vista x64)

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:

• 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. Over the course of the next few days, I will try and rework this into a more reader friendly form - bear with me, if you see broken formatting inbetween.


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):