Catalyst 11.10 WHQL is finally available and it is the first official driver release for Radeon graphics cards after the final version of this years' most anticipated game, Battlefield 3, came out. Strangely enough, Battlefield 3 is nowhere mentioned throughout the release notes, which you can review for yourself here or use the attached version below (Updated, see below!). AMDs Andrew Dodd, going by the name of CatalystCreator in the microblogging service twitter, recommends to use Catalyst 11.9 CAP4 after installing Catalyst 11.10 WHQL. Catalyst Application Profiles or CAP for short, are linked below as well. He goes on to say, that Catalyst 11.10 WHQL contains the same fixes as are present in the earlier Catalyst 11.10 Preview v3 drivers.
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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.
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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.]
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• Slightly off-topic but very important: TTIP leaks
• World's 1st: Xeon Phi KNL with 78 physical cores
• Insightful thoughts about Knights Landing at RWT
• Cuda 6 gives unified memory to developers
• Kaveri coming with 856 GFLOPS at CES 2014
• Geforce GTX 780 Ti launch review #1 (PCGH.de, german)
• Geforce GTX 780 Ti launch review #2 (Hardware.fr, french)
• Radeon R9 290X launch review #2 (PCGH.de, german)
• Radeon R9 290X launch review #2 (Hardware.fr, french)
• Geforce GTX Titan launch review #1 (PCGH.de, german)
• Geforce GTX Titan launch review #2 (Hardware.fr, french)
• First time ever 2 TFLOPS DP from a single Processor (Youtube)
• Direct link to AMD's Catalyst 13.2 beta5 driver w/CF support for 3DMark ICF



Obviously, this being a one-man-show, I cannot cover everything worth knowing that happens on and off the web. So I keep to a wise line from a probably wise person: „If you can't do your own story, link to it!” And this is what this regularly updated post will be about: Links to interesting articles, downloads, ressources, background and maybe even reviews and videos throughout the web: No bull, no bias, just the facts. ...

Catalyst Drivers 11.7 WHQL and 11.8 Preview have been readied for download and AMD has moved their APP-SDK for accelerating OpenCL applications to version 2.5, now finally supporting Double Precision/Doubles/FP64/watchamacallit via cl_khr_fp64. The caveat though: It's only included for Cypress-based GPUs, not Cayman and not older chips capable of 64 bit precise calculations. According to AMD, APP 2.5 now also leverages AVX, Advanced Vector Extensions on CPUs supporting it, namely Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's upcoming Bulldozer. The first CAP release for 11.7 also includes optimizations for the alpha-version of Battlefield 3. Additionally, AMD has posted a preview driver for Catalyst 11.8 which promises speed improvements in DirectX 11 mode for Crysis 2 and Fear 3, 30 percent faster MLAA and HD3D-support for DP monitors.
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Largely unnoticed, Nvidia has added support for OpenCL 1.1 to it's publicly available Geforce driver 280.19 - only months, 9 to be precise, after AMD has outfitted their Catalyst driver suite with that OpenCL revision in 10.10 release and only weeks after Open CL 1.1 has been officially introduced. To be fair though, Nvidia has provided registered developers with earlier driver releases featuring OpenCL 1.1 for quite some time now. But it seems as if all the beta testing did not reveal the performance issues surfaced with the first open installment of Release 280 Geforce drivers. At least in the OpenCL space, performance has drastically been reduced for some applications. Luxmark 1.0 for example sees my trusty Geforce GTX 480 now at 62 to 65 percent of it's former potential, ...

AMD has put it's Catalyst driver suite 11.6 WHQL on its way a few days ago. With the official integration of AMD Steady Video, which I've reported on earlier already, the company is starting to pick some more or less low-hanging fruits from it's Fusion-platform. Steady Video leverages the processing power of the GPU in order to remove shakiness from cheap internet video aka Youtube - more on this further down the page. This 11.6 Catalyst WHQL driver is intended for all HD-Radeons capable of DirectX 10, 10.1 or 11 as well as Fusion-APUs from the Brazos-Series (C-50, E-300, E-450) and the recently introduced Llano quadcore-APUs (A4,- A6- and A6-series).

[Update July, 9th 2011: AMD has rolled out two hotfixes for Catalyst 11.6 Radeon drivers and has made available an early preview of Catalyst 11.7 on it's Developer's website. The hotfixes add support for AMD's A-Series APUs (Hotfix 11.6a) and resolve bluescreens (BSOD) when a Radeon graphics card is connected via HDMI or Display Port instead of DVI.
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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…). ...