- Apr 25, 2013
- 5,355
AMD Ups Their Game With Major Driver Update Catalyst Omega
The new driver brings an incredible amount of features, starting with promises of up to a 19 % performance boost.
Update: It appears that the news about the driver release was a little premature. The drivers are no longer available on the AMD website. Expect an updated post for when the drivers will become available.
Original post follows.
AMD has upped their game with a new GPU driver that takes Nvidia head on. Introducing Catalyst Omega.
AMD claims Catalyst Omega can raise performance up by 19 % on high end cards, and 29 % on APU cards. Our source verifies that this works on titles such as Bioshock Infinite, but more titles, even some in AMD's Gaming Evolved program, will see no gains.
On top of the performance boost, Catalyst Omega brings in additional features, the most noteworthy being VSR, or Virtual Super Resolution. Like Nvidia's DSR, it renders games at 4K quality, before downsampling them to the actual monitor resolution. This process makes anti-aliasing obsolete, so really, AMD adding this has been a long time coming.
Dual Graphics and Crossfire receive improved frame pacing from Catalyst Omega, reducing stutter and instances of frame time variations.
Catalyst Omega also brings new video features. Fluid Motion boosts interpolation to reduce judder. Contour Removal eliminates compression artifacts without affecting detail. There is also 1080p Detail Enhancement, which takes lower resolution content and improves their sharpness and detail, for large displays such as 4K monitors.
Catalyst Omega adds support for FreeSync, Alienware Graphics Amplifier, 5K, and other features from other partners. If you use Eyefinity, Catalyst Omega will let you use 24 monitor arrays on 4 GPU systems.
And then there's support for AMD's own advanced tech, such as TressFX Hair 3.0, OpenCL 2.0, Mantle game capture, and Gaming Evolved client specific features such as FPS measure and streaming.
Finally, Catalyst Omega comes with the requisite bug fixes, and they claim they have addressed the top 10 most reported problems with it.
You can download Catalyst Omega for your AMD rig here.
Source
The new driver brings an incredible amount of features, starting with promises of up to a 19 % performance boost.
Update: It appears that the news about the driver release was a little premature. The drivers are no longer available on the AMD website. Expect an updated post for when the drivers will become available.
Original post follows.
AMD has upped their game with a new GPU driver that takes Nvidia head on. Introducing Catalyst Omega.
AMD claims Catalyst Omega can raise performance up by 19 % on high end cards, and 29 % on APU cards. Our source verifies that this works on titles such as Bioshock Infinite, but more titles, even some in AMD's Gaming Evolved program, will see no gains.
On top of the performance boost, Catalyst Omega brings in additional features, the most noteworthy being VSR, or Virtual Super Resolution. Like Nvidia's DSR, it renders games at 4K quality, before downsampling them to the actual monitor resolution. This process makes anti-aliasing obsolete, so really, AMD adding this has been a long time coming.
Dual Graphics and Crossfire receive improved frame pacing from Catalyst Omega, reducing stutter and instances of frame time variations.
Catalyst Omega also brings new video features. Fluid Motion boosts interpolation to reduce judder. Contour Removal eliminates compression artifacts without affecting detail. There is also 1080p Detail Enhancement, which takes lower resolution content and improves their sharpness and detail, for large displays such as 4K monitors.
Catalyst Omega adds support for FreeSync, Alienware Graphics Amplifier, 5K, and other features from other partners. If you use Eyefinity, Catalyst Omega will let you use 24 monitor arrays on 4 GPU systems.
And then there's support for AMD's own advanced tech, such as TressFX Hair 3.0, OpenCL 2.0, Mantle game capture, and Gaming Evolved client specific features such as FPS measure and streaming.
Finally, Catalyst Omega comes with the requisite bug fixes, and they claim they have addressed the top 10 most reported problems with it.
You can download Catalyst Omega for your AMD rig here.
Source
