Tuesday, May 27th 2014
AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta Driver Available for Download
AMD has now let loose a new graphics card driver, a fresh Catalyst build which brings performance enhancements for games like Watch Dogs and Murdered Soul Suspect, plus Eyefinity and Mantle improvements.
The Catalyst 14.6 Beta is available for Windows 7 and 8.1 (8.0 users will have to update to 8.1 if they want to install it) and supports Radeon HD 5000, HD 6000, HD 7000, HD 8000, R5 200, R7 200 and R9 200 Series desktop cards, and Mobility Radeon HD 5000, HD 6000, HD 6000M, HD 7000M and HD 8000M mobile GPUs.Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta Driver for Windows
Performance improvements
The Catalyst 14.6 Beta is available for Windows 7 and 8.1 (8.0 users will have to update to 8.1 if they want to install it) and supports Radeon HD 5000, HD 6000, HD 7000, HD 8000, R5 200, R7 200 and R9 200 Series desktop cards, and Mobility Radeon HD 5000, HD 6000, HD 6000M, HD 7000M and HD 8000M mobile GPUs.Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta Driver for Windows
Performance improvements
- Watch Dogs performance improvements
AMD Radeon R9 290X - 1920x1080 4x MSAA - improves up to 25%
AMD Radeon R9290X - 2560x1600 4x MSAA - improves up to 28%
AMD Radeon R9290X CrossFire configuration (3840x2160 Ultra settings, MSAA = 4X) - 92% scaling - Murdered Soul Suspect performance improvements
AMD Radeon R9 290X - 2560x1600 4x MSAA - improves up to 16%
AMD Radeon R9290X CrossFire configuration (3840x2160 Ultra settings, MSAA = 4X) - 93% scaling
- Mixed Resolution Support
- A new architecture providing brand new capabilities
- Display groups can be created with monitors of different resolution (including difference sizes and shapes)
- Users have a choice of how surface is created over the display group
Fill - legacy mode, best for identical monitors
Fit - create the Eyefinity surface using best available rectangular area with attached displays.
Expand - create a virtual Eyefinity surface using desktops as viewports onto the surface. - Eyefinity Display Alignment
- Enables control over alignment between adjacent monitors
- One-Click Setup
- Driver detects layout of extended desktops
Can create Eyefinity display group using this layout in one click! - New user controls for video color and display settings
- Greater control over Video Color Management:
- Controls have been expanded from a single slider for controlling Boost and Hue to per color axis
- Color depth control for Digital Flat Panels (available on supported HDMI and DP displays)
- Allows users to select different color depths per resolution and display
- Mantle now supports AMD Mobile products with Enduro technology
- Battlefield 4: AMD Radeon HD 8970M (1366x768; high settings) - 21% gain
- Thief: AMD Radeon HD 8970M (1920x1080; high settings) - 14% gain
- Star Swarm: AMD Radeon HD 8970M (1920x1080; medium settings) - 274% gain
- Enables support for Multi-GPU configurations with Thief (requires the latest Thief update)
- JPEG decoding acceleration was first enabled on the A10 APU Series in AMD Catalyst 14.1 beta, and has now been extended to the AMD AM1 Platform
- Provides fast JPEG decompression
- Provides Power Efficiency for JPEG decompression