AMD Catalyst Driver 11.9 WHQL out, 11.10 preview for Battlefield 3 Beta available

AMDs Catalyst driver 11.9 WHQL is out and actually preceding it, AMDs Catalyst 11.10 Preview was made available for the Battlefield 3 (Open) Beta. While the former is mostly a welcomed bugfixing driver, the latter brings some changes with it - not counting the performance improvements for the Battlefield 3 Open Beta currently underway.

The Catalyst 11.9 WHQL driver adds support for some DisplayPort panels in AMDs Stereo API HD3D and apart from that is not very spectacular. It installed without a hitch on my freshly set-up Phenom II system coming from the 11.8 WHQL and features a nice list of improvements with regard to functionality and bugfixes rather than performance improvements. Those seem to be reserverd for the 11.10 driver as the preview version made available for the Battlefield 3 Beta (did I mention it already?) brings some of them along with a few new GUI elements, namely in the Overdrive, CrossfireX and Information Center sections. But first things first.

Official Catalyst 11.9 WQHL
Up until now, you could go over to AMD's official download-site as well, but they've made some changes to it so that you can (or „have to“) run an auto detect program in order to determine the downloads most suitable for you. This auto detection tool is about 268 kB in size and is available here. For those of you preferring to make your own choices, you can go to AMDs other official site or use these links to the Catalyst 11.9 WHQL driver files.

• Catalyst 11.9 WHQL (Windows XP, 32 Bit)
• Catalyst 11.9 WHQL (Windows XP, 64 Bit)
• Catalyst 11.9 WHQL (Windows 7/Vista, 32 Bit)
• Catalyst 11.9 WHQL (Windows 7/Vista, 64 Bit)
• Catalyst 11.8 (!) WHQL Application Profiles Cap4 (all OS)

Note for Windows 7 users: For the first time, AMD requires as per release notes an installed Windows 7 Service Pack 1 officially in order for the Catalyst drivers to work. The release notes for Catalyst 11.8 did not mention it, so I am fairly certain that this is a new requirement.

Here are the version numbers for AMDs Catalyst 11.9 WHQL, indicating that the driver has been put together on september 14th while the Catalyst/Vision Engine Control Center is five days older. AMDs developer site has a driver out already that supports OpenGL 4.2 but the official 11.9 WHQL still is at OpenGL 4.1. The OpenGL 4.2 extension are all reporting basically nothing yet.

• Catalyst Version 11.9
• Open GL ICD 6.14.10.11079
• Direct3D Driver 7.14.10.0860
• 2D Driver 8.01.01.1186
• OpenCL Driver 732.1
• CAL-Driver 1.4.1546 (VM)
• Catalyst Control Center 2011.0908.1355.23115
• Packaging 8.892-110914m-125030CC-ATI

Having available a platform qualifying for AMD CPU Overdrive for the first time, I've put the feature to the test. Since my board refrains from booting when I change CPU multiplier or even voltage, AMDs CPU Overdrive seems like a godsend to me not wanting to fiddle around with third-party tools. First, you have to run Auto-Tune in order to determine available clock levels. It raises the multiplier of my Phenom II X4 975 BE in half-steps, each incrementing upping the clock rate 100 MHz from 3,6 GHz base. There's one little problem here: In order to make those levels available for CPU Overdrive, you need to press stop in the Auto-Tune and then reboot the PC - that means, you cannot let it run automatically because eventually the frequency will be too high and the PC crashes, forcing you to run Auto-Tune again.






After being through this procedure, I've found that the little window popping up when Auto-Tune starts, is actually telling the truth (well, mostly) when informing about the voltage level for my 45nm-CPU. From a default 1,43ish volt it is raised straight to 1,55 volts with CPU-z reporting even higher. This is a little bit too high for my taste, especially when you're explicitly told you're voiding your warranty when using CPU Overdrive. AMD should improve CPU Overdrive to work with lower voltage levels in the future.

The list of fixed bugs, performance enhancements and new features include: The whole list of improvements is posted over at AMD's release notes website (in zipped format attached in case the URL moves).

Catalyst 11.10 Preview
Battlefield 3 receives a lot of attention from gamers as well as from IHVs. AMD has made available a preview driver. An article in AMDs knowledge base describes the features of the Battlefield 3 Beta or rather Catalyst 11.10 preview driver as well as providing the following link:

• Catalyst 11.9 WHQL (Windows 7/Vista, 32 & 64 Bit)

This driver, according to AMD, does the following in order to optimize your Battlefield 3 Beta experience:

The version numbers for AMDs Catalyst 11.10 Preview driver look like this - and the newly designed Information Center and GPU Overdrive panels you can view by clicking the thumbnails below.

• Catalyst Version 11.10
• Open GL ICD 6.14.10.11158
• Direct3D Driver 7.14.10.0867
• 2D Driver 8.01.01.1199
• OpenCL Driver 775.2
• CAL-Driver 1.4.1589 (VM)
• Catalyst Control Center 2011.0923.2225.38371
• Packaging 8.901-110923a-125918E-ATI

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.

As of this writing, the most recent version of AMDs APP SDK still is the previously released version 2.5.

• 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 - 11.8)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for Vista/7 x64 (8.10 - 11.8)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for XP x86 (8.10 - 11.8)
• Archived Catalyst Drivers for XP x64 (8.10 - 11.8)

3. Radeon HD series with AGP interface - Hotfix awaits
Also, there's the special page for the AGP-versions of the drivers. As of this writing, the most recent listed catalyst version there is 11.8, but 11.9 is on their servers nonetheless and here are the links:

• Catalyst 11.9 AGP-Hotfix (Windows XP x86)
• Catalyst 11.9 AGP-Hotfix (Windows XP x64)
• Catalyst 11.9 AGP-Hotfix (Windows 7/Vista x86)
• Catalyst 11.9 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.