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
I get a lower score on valley when I'm able to finish a run with these drivers than I did when I only had one card (after a CTD on every run) 3Dmark crashes hard on Fire, and sometimes reports that a DX11 device has been disconnected in the middle of a run.
I thought, well no gaming for me on my Radeon rig until a proper driver release, I don't "play" BF4 anymore and couldn't care less about synthetic mantle benchmarks, so I decided to go back to mining again, one card was stuck at 200 KH/s and the other at 90KH/s, these are 900+ KH/s each cards :(
I reformatted my hard drive, reinstalled everything cleanly, to no avail, same issues, integrated card has always been disabled on my BIOS it's one of the first things I do when I first boot a new computer, but I double checked just to be certain after reading this thread.
After over 12 hours wasted I'm back to the 13.25 drivers that came with my DCUII card, everything is back to normal.
Anyone else encountered these issues?
Also played some Trine 2 for the sake of it and it ran fine too so that was good to see. I haven't tested any other games or benches.
If prices hadn't jacked up like woah, I'd have another 290 and be in a similar boat but alas, I am not much help. :(
We can hope for a quick fix soon
Could really use some help here and the release notes don't mention any problems with my specific hardware config, after wasting 12 hrs I would really like to find out if the problem is on my end.
Game developers are better off working on their games rather than wasting time on Mantle.
Known Issues
I wish people had read my post before they started attacking my reading skills, anyways, like I said, I went back to the 13.25 drivers that came with my card, that solved all of my problems.
And please don't attack me asking why I tried the drivers if I don't use mantle, the drivers fix some other non-mantle related issues and I thought they would be worth a try, obviously I was wrong and I just posted my own findings in hope of getting some help.
To all other people who has posted helpful tips, thank you very much, your input is much appreciated :)
I haven't had this issue prior to this driver, and if it continues, I'll be reverting... :(\
edit: and I just got a BSOD watching youtube video :mad:
I stopped using MSI AB BETA awhile back because of just that. Once I viewed a couple of videos in arrow it wouldn't want to play anymore and always had to reboot the machine. Uninstalled MSI AB beta and just OC with CCC and no more issues ever since.
For about 3 seconds before I bsod I was getting the same results on 200 res scale with mantle.
If you think im lying or don't think im telling the truth your mistaken because I don't lie ive no need to why would I ?
Ive seen it with my own eyes why else would I give it to much of my time to get it to work stable.
You will have to trust what im saying and time will tell when they fix these terrible drivers.
It took me 50 bsod for that single chance to view it.
The cpu frame time was thin and around 9ms the gpu was on 5 ms
screen res was on 2560x1600 full ultra @ 200 res scale.
I know what I saw ive no reason to lie about this because im not happy because I got these cards in preparation for mantle and the fact they don't work for me gets me mad.
I don't want to praise mantle because I feel ive been spat in the face but facts are facts.
Im only telling you what I have seen
Seriously, I don't know where some people are going with this, AMD said Mantle official specifications won't be launched until Q3 2014 at it's earliest, untill then, untill they actualy have it defined to begin with, what do people expect? Does it work in D3D11? It does, Mantle is just some gravy (that will probably take a lot of time to taste just right and not ruing the other meals).
And the ones with IT'S NOT OPEN blah blah blah's are the worst. It's like FORD having a prototype of their EcoBoost engines and every other car buyer out there complaining that they don't share their early-stage technology, thus it will suck for the end-consumer, which possibly would blow up their (other brand) cars, for the time being.