AMD released new Catalyst driver version 15.15 which is designed for AMD Radeon Fury and R9-390X cards. But clever people have modified the INF file to support all AMD graphic cards (tested and working on my HD7950). I’ve also replaced certain files to ensure DXVA hardware video acceleration.
DOWNLOAD:
It is now official. AMD Radeon R9-380 is planned for Q2-2015, roughly around March. It will sport whooping 4096 stream processors based on Tonga design (GCN 1.2) on a single die, new framebuffer compression for increased bandwidth (also from Tonga GPU), all paired to 4GB of HBM stacked VRAM (Video RAM). Nothing said on the GPU clocks, but I hope it will be 1,2 GHz. Memory clocks on HBM memory are lower, clocking at just 1,2GHz, but they offer massive bandwidth of 128GB/s. Doesn’t sound much on its own, but each Radeon R9-380 graphic card will feature 4 units, totaling 512GB/s bandwidth. And that’s before even taking framebuffer compression into account! R9-290 only has 320GB/s, so do the math yourself 😀
Was already looking at GTX 970, but considering my HD7950 is still doing pretty well I thought, why not wait these two more months and have an option to decide between two different GPU’s. If Radeon turns out to be awesome, that’s what I’ll take. If it’ll be “meh”, then I’ll take the GTX 970, depending on the price of course. Either way it’s win-win for consumers 😀
So, the highly anticipated AMD Catalyst Omega drivers have finally landed. And yes, they actually have Omega in the name and no, they are not in any way related to the old community modded Omega drivers. They feature several interesting features like…
VSR (Virtual Super Resolution)
Basically this is the same as NVIDIA’s DSR. It renders the image at 4K and downscales it to 1080p on the output. It convinces games that your display can render higher resolution than it actually supports, so the game has to offer you option for 4K. All fine and well, except it only works with R9 290 cards. Srsly? Where is that “all GCN cards will get the same treatment” from the past?. HD7900 series are GCN powered. And yet we got screwed. It’s good that in the future I’ll get this feature if I decide to buy another Radeon, but why screw the existing HD7900 users? Which also includes R9-280 users because it is based upon HD7900 series. I’ve been with AMD for the last several generations of GPU’s. Do you think I’d not buy another Radeon if I get VSR now on my HD7950? If that was the case, I’d already have GTX 970 in my box. But I don’t, because I’ve decided to wait for AMD’s response with R9-300 series when it gets out. Maybe HD7900 doesn’t have the 4K grunt for modern games, but there are older games that we play and that would greatly benefit from VSR. Anyway…
Improved Frame Pacing
Supposedly only for multi card configurations, improving many games smoothness. They list Tomb Raider, Metro series, Batman Arkham Origins, Sniper Elite 3 and more. We’ll see if it makes any difference on single GPU…
AMD Fluid Motion Video
This feature is basically what high end LCD TV’s do, interpolate missing frames and make videos super smooth and sharp during motion. Something like Philips Perfect Natural Motion or LG’s TruMotion. Only downside is that it only works in Cyberlink PowerDVD 14. Which makes it kinda useless considering I never used that thing and never will. Media Player Classic Home Theater (MPC HC) or VLC support would make tons more sense…
Video filtering and 1080p Detail Enhancement
These features enhance video quality and are available for regular common media players that use DXVA and also work on HD7900 series. Which is nice.
4K Ultra HD Upscaling
It gives ability to upscale 1080p video into 4K, enhance it and display it on your 4K monitor or 4K TV. I have a 4K Philips LCD, but since I’m on HD7900, I’m out of luck yet again…
Performance Enhancements
AMD claims 19% average framerate improvements which sounds like a lot, but TechPowerUp tests proved a bit differently. You can check it out here: Synthetic tests Game tests
While the differences aren’t all that big I’m still going to use it since I use latest drivers all the time. It has worked well so far so why not. I just wish they’d focus less on R9 only. I get it, it’s their current high end, but by supporting your older userbase, you’re showing them your long term commitment. Showing that you care. And it means a lot to me and is a great factor when I’m considering my next upgrade. If I’m being treated well as a customer even when I don’t have the latest and most expensive graphic card, I sure will buy a new high end card from the same company when I’ll consider my next upgrade. So far AMD showed decent support, but I’d wish for a bit more…
Download:
AMD has released a new Catalyst driver package version 14.6 BETA. Most significant changes are removal of the Windows 8 support, so make sure you update your Windows to Windows 8.1 Update 1 which is currently the latest version. It’s just so much better, so I’m wondering why you haven’t done so already 😛 Other important changes are quite big performance improvements, mostly for R9-290 series, but maybe even older HD7xxx users will benefit from it. Who knows, I will update anyway as I always do. Oh and AMD also added support for GPU accelerated JPEG images decoding, resulting in twice as fast JPEG images rendering. Too bad only a limited set of APU’s and GPU’s is supported, so I don’t think my older AMD E-450 will be getting any love from it.
Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst™ 14.6 Beta Driver for Windows
Known Issues
Download:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Windows%208.1%20-%2064#amd-catalyst-packages
AMD driver webpage is experiencing some weird problems, which makes only a 64bit version available for download. I hope they will soon fix the webpage problems…
Have you just installed AMD Catalyst Control Center and when you want to open it, mouse changes to “in progress” indicator and then nothing happens? If you check the Event Viewer, KERNELBASE.DLL and CLI.exe errors for AMD stuff, it’s not .NET Framework issue at all. I thought this first as well, but after checking if I have latest version and verifying system integrity (I just made a WIn8.1 system Refresh to clean it up) with sfc /scannow and all was well. Catalyst drivers out of the blue on a perfectly clean system decided to go haywire. Tried reinstalling them several times, deleting them by hand in Device Manager, nothing.
Solution? Only way to do it was to use AMD Driver Cleaner located here:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Clean-Uninstall-Utility.aspx
Uninstalled the drivers with the above tool, re-downloaded latest WHQL drivers and after that, Catalyst Control Center was working fine again. Just another day in systems hell…
AMD has finally released the very latest Catalyst 14.4 drivers that are WHQL certified.
Release notes:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDCatalyst14-4WINReleaseNotes.aspx
Highlights of AMD Catalyst™ 14.4 Windows Driver:
Known Issues:
Download:
AMD has now officially released the Release Candidate (RC) version of the Catalyst 14.4 drivers that I have posted few days ago.
Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst™ 14.4 Release Candidate Driver for Windows
Known Issues
Download
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx
There was a driver leak today for AMD Catalyst 14.4 BETA drivers. They are unofficial leaked ones, so not much is known about them. They were released for latest AMD R9-295X2 graphic cards, but they do seem to work really well on my HD7950 as well.
DOWNLOAD:
So, another rant time. My PC is turned on pretty much 24/7, including when I’m sleeping. I set the music to play on low volume, sometimes I run BOINC client or something, so basically system is running. But since I don’t need display, I always turn it off. In the morning, when I wake up, try to turn the display on and then it’s rage mode on.
Display refuses to wake. Smashing keyboard and mice, nothing. Music is playing normal, Caps and Num lock responds on keyboard and I can also control music with keyboard multimedia controls. Only way to get to the system was to reset it.
So, I checked on The Internet and found out there are LOADS of people with such problems. Mostly seems to be related to Windows 7, Windows 8 in combination with AMD Radeon graphic card (usually HD7xxx series). I didn’t think of it because with Windows 7 I never had such problems, only when I switched to Windows 8.1. I’m using AMD Radeon HD7950 3GB with AMD Catalyst 13.12, so that’s where similarities with other reports started to make sense. Supposedly this problem was happening before, AMD fixed it with some Catalyst version and now with Catalyst 13.12 WHQL, it seems to be back again.
What’s even more annoying is the difficulty of reproducing this issue. It’s not enough to keep PC running and turn off the display by hand, it actually has to be over night. Like AMD drivers are checking that display is turned off over night and it fucks up everything with that. Because when I turn off display through the day, I never had this problem, even though the conditions were identical and the display was turned off for the same period of time (~6 hours). So, 6 hours over day and the problem never happened to me. Have it turned of for 6 hours over night (between midnight and 7 AM), pretty much every single morning, the damn thing won’t wake up when I move the mice around.
I’ve tried everything, changing USB devices sleeping, changed CPU C states, disabled ULPC for graphic card, checked BIOS settings, nothing.
Symptoms:
Display won’t wake up after being turned off over night with PC actually running and not being in a sleep state. Display is set to turn itself of after PC is idle for 15 minutes. Keyboard and mouse seem to be responsive, but Windows refuses to wake up the display. Pressing ON/OFF button on display doesn’t make any difference, changing input mode (between VGA and DVI) using display built-in settings (or button) doesn’t make any difference. It just stays in sleep mode.
This only happens if display is turned off over night for ~6 hours. It never happened when PC was in the same exact conditions over day. Seems like AMD throws the graphic card into some sort of deeper sleep state if it’s night time based on local time read from user computer. And since it’s happening mostly on AMD HD7xxx series which have ZeroCore feature, it seems to me like AMD fucked it up pretty badly.
Temporal solution:
What seems to work for me is to unplug DVI cable from graphic card and plug it back in. This seems to re-initialize the connection and the desktop instantly appears on the screen. Same should apply to HDMI and DisplayPort connections.
Some say switching to lockscreen in Windows 8 also wakes up the display, but I haven’t tested that yet.
Permanent solution:
Well have to wait for AMD to fix this damn thing. Anyone with friends at AMD who could speed things up? Because it’s really annoying and widespread issue with no real solution other than the above.
If you are the sort of person who doesn’t mind installing beta graphic drivers just so you can gain that extra 1% of performance, you have probably noticed that all the AMD Catalyst Beta drivers force install .NET 4.5 framework because someone at AMD didn’t do his job properly. My system has .NET 4.5 Framework properly installed, yet AMD Catalyst installer says “Current version not installed” and installs it over again. What this does is that it borks up your existing installation, so Windows Update will have to re-download all the security updates again which take ages to complete even on my main system which is no snail. It’s stupid and the one responsible for this moronic issue should be smacked in the face.
How to get around this problem?
Download the installer and run it as usual. Click Install and wait for the package to extract its files. When AMD Catalyst Install Manager appears, click Cancel and exit it. Now go to where the package extracted its files (for example: “C:\AMD\AMD_Catalyst_13.8_Beta2”).
Now open the folder where files were extracted and look for a folder “DotNet45” inside “C:\AMD\AMD_Catalyst_13.8_Beta2\Packages\Apps”. Delete the entire “DotNet45” folder. Now go back to main folder and run setup.exe again. This time, AMD Catalyst Install manager won’t even list .NET 4.5 Framework anymore.
This of course doesn’t mean you can use it without the framework, you still need to install it (once), but not every single freaking time you install new BETA drivers.
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