Sunday, February 2nd 2014
AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta 1.6 Posted
Here it is, the first public beta of AMD Catalyst 14.1, featuring Mantle, AMD's 3D graphics API designed to rival Direct3D and OpenGL. The driver enables the Mantle renderer on Battlefield 4, which is known to enhance performance on certain GPUs based on AMD's Graphics CoreNext micro-architecture. The driver can't be installed as an upgrade to an existing driver, which must be cleanly uninstalled first. In addition to Mantle, Catalyst 14.1 beta resolves rendering issues on a boat-load of games.
If Battlefield 4 crashes as soon as you go to options, disable your integrated graphics in BIOS or device manager.DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 14.1 beta 1.6
The change-log follows:
Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta Driver for Windows
Support for the following new AMD Desktop APU (Accelerated Processors) products:
If Battlefield 4 crashes as soon as you go to options, disable your integrated graphics in BIOS or device manager.DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 14.1 beta 1.6
The change-log follows:
Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta Driver for Windows
Support for the following new AMD Desktop APU (Accelerated Processors) products:
- AMD A10-7850K
- AMD A10-7700K
- AMD's Mantle is a groundbreaking graphics API that promises to transform the world of game development to help bring better, faster games to the PC
- Performance gain of up to 45%(versus the DirectX version) for Battlefield 4 on the R9 290 Series
- Performance gain of up to 200% (versus the DirectX version) for Star Swarm on the R9 290 Series
- AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta must be used in conjunction with versions of these applications that support Mantle
- It is expected that these applications will have future updates to support additional AMD Mantle features
- AMD Radeon R9 Series GPUs
- AMD Radeon R7 Series GPUs
- AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs
- AMD Radeon HD 8000 Series GPUs
- AMD A10-7000 Series and AMD A8-7000 Series APUs
- Enhanced AMD CrossFire frame pacing - Support for 4K panel and Eyefinity non-XDMA CrossFire solutions (including the AMD Radeon R9 280, 270 Series, 7900 Series, 7800 Series) and Dual Graphics configurations
- Frame pacing ensures that frames rendered across multiple GPUs in an AMD CrossFire configuration will be displayed at an even and regular pace
- Supported on 4K panels and Eyefinity configurations
- Supported on AMD Dual Graphics configurations
- Supported on DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications
- Resolved issue highlights of AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta
- Resolves ground texture flickering seen in Total War: Rome 2 with high settings (and below) set in game
- Resolves flickering texture corruption when playing Call of Duty: Ghosts (multi-player) in the space station level
- Ground texture flickering seen in Total War: Rome 2 with high settings (and below) set in game
- Flickering texture corruption when playing Call of Duty: Ghosts (multi-player) in the space station level
- Blu-ray playback using PowerDVD black screen on extended mode
- Streaming VUDU HD/HDX content on Sharp PN-K321 (DP) causes the right-side half to flicker in and out
- Black screen happened after wake up the monitor
- Full screen issue at rotation in DX9 mode
- Video window black screen when using Samsung Kies to play video
- Crysis 2 negative scaling in outdoor scene
- Crysis 2 has insufficient CrossFire scaling in some scene
- Red Faction: The game has no or negative crossfire scaling with DX9 and DX11
- Age of Conan has corruption and performance issues with crossfire enabled
- Company of Heroes shadows are corrupted when using crossfire
- Resident Evil 5 's performance is unstable when display mode set to Window mode
- Total War: Shogun 2 flickering menu/text
- Frame rate drop when disabling post-processing in 3DMark06
- Negative Crossfire scaling with game "The Secret World" in DX11 mode
- F1 2012 Crashes to desktop
- Tomb Raider Hair Simulation Stutters on CFX
- Negative CrossFire scaling experienced in Call of Duty
- Battlefield 3 performance drop on Haswell systems
- Choppy video playback on 4k Video
- VSync ON Tearing with 2x1 Eyefinity SLS CrossFire
- Far Cry 3 - Game flickering while changing resolutions
- Display corruption and BSOD occurs when extending a display after disabling Multiple GPU SLS array
- Flickering seen when enable three 4kx2k panels at the same time
- No Video, just a black screen when setting Chrome to run in "High Performance" when playing certain video clips
- Image crashed on Starcraft game
- Mantle performance for the AMD Radeon HD 7000/HD 8000 Series GPUs and AMD Radeon R9 280X and R9 270X GPUs will be optimized for BattleField 4 in future AMD Catalyst releases. These products will see limited gains in BattleField 4 and AMD is currently investigating optimizations for them.
- Multi-GPU support under DirectX and Mantle will be added to StarSwarm in a future application patch
- Intermittent stuttering or stability issues may occur when utilizing Mantle with AMD CrossFire technology in BattleField 4 - AMD recommends using the DirectX code path when playing Battlefield 4 with multiple GPUs. A future AMD Catalyst release will resolve these issues
- Notebooks based on AMD Enduro or PowerXpress technologies are currently not supported by the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4
- AMD Eyefinity configurations utilizing portrait display orientations are currently not supported by the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4
- AMD Eyefinity technology is not currently supported in the Star Swarm application
- AMD testing for the AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta Mantle driver has been concentrated on the following products: AMD Radeon R9 290X, R9 290, R9 280, R9 270, R7 260X, R7 260, HD 7000 Series, HD 8000 Series, A10-7850K and A10-7700K. Future AMD Catalyst releases will include full test coverage for all AMD products supported by Mantle.
- Graphics hardware in the AMD A10-7850K and A10-7700K may override the presence of a discrete GPU under the Mantle code path in Battlefield 4
- Frame Pacing for Dual Graphics and non-XDMA configurations above 2560x1600 do not currently work with Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4. An upcoming release will enable support
- DX9 Dual graphics is not supported in AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta. An upcoming release will enable support
108 Comments on AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta 1.6 Posted
DICE is just banking on bringing something similar to what they're working with on the PS4 to the PC which gives them some flexibility and programmability.. something developers actually seem to like. On the other hand, we have the Xbone and their implementation of DirectX. If The presentation of DICE is true, Mantle is pretty close to what they do on the PS4. For all we know, it might be easier for them to port code from the PS4 then to convert DirectX from the xbone or vice versa.
DX9 lasted for 3 gens, but there were variances between each DirectX9 version, remember 9.0c and Far Cry?
DirectX 10 was only one gen. (from an AMD perspective) and the same goes for 10.1
This is also the reason why sometimes fixing something to work better in a situation can break something else and the drivers require extensive beta testing before reaching a stable release.
:toast:
Jokes aside, a new milestone has been reached and regardless of the outcome of Mantle, it's foundations are set: this may turn out to be one of those situations of "before Mantle" and "after Mantle".
Time will tell.
Ya'all can come to your own conclusions. Me, I see 100% boost with 7970 using mantle. Mantle = actual GCN driver, should have been launched with 7-series, but AMD had issues with memory management, remember? With that said, time for me to stop posting on TPU. Have fun guys!
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GTFOOH...
57.77/38.80 = 1.4889
48.89%≠100%
Also, your benchmarks indicate an R9 but you are suggesting 7970... Which is it? A R9 280X?
My cards were seen as unknown hardware before install.
so-called beta doesnt mean a thing, most ati drivers have been the same, we have whqls with bsods & major issues, we have betas that work great
it's just a new driver branch, the little sticker microsoft puts out is irrelevant
& who waits for whql to complain about bugs? report them! amd.com/betareport
100% in max batch. That'd be the most CPU-limited scenario.
raw FPS, sure, but that's averaged out FPS. FPS on DirectX tanks to < 10 FPS, in Mantle, it barely drops below 30 FPS. You are comparing FPS over 6 minutes of test, not every single millisecond of the test, which paints a different picture than just those numbers do.
It's all about how you analyze the results, and what gives those results. Looking at the end numbers only doesn't tell you squat. Which is why I should stop posting. :roll: Everyone will draw their own conclusions anyway. Anyone could look at mining performance AMD vs NV, then gaming performance, see the problems there, and could have expected this. Add in power consumption, and it has been obvious since day one that AMD GPUs have been far under-utilized, never mind that AMD said they had driver issues getting the most out of these chips well over a year ago, but performance hasn't increased...stability has, sure.
67% increase in performance VS, however notice the extra numbers of objects, 5% more, and as we all know geometry is compute core limited and thus not linear in scale. Once the delta is reached in DX performance per unit unit is exponential in decrease. Per unit average is still 28% higher on top of the already 67% higher performance at the higher unit per frame render.
Overall I would feel good saying it was a 75% increase, for free, so your complaint is exactly what? You didn't get in on it?
developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/gamedev/docs/GDC_2013_DUDASH_DeferredContexts.pdf
Flushing due to state changes still pose problems, perhaps mantle address this throught the use of HSA so that the GPU is aware (pseudo aware if off chip memory controller is in use such as the ARM chip Nvidia seems to be implementing**from what I believe**) of what the CPU is working and the thread changes in process.