Introduction

AMD has the habit of making its year-ending driver release "memorable" by either coming up with sweeping performance increases or introducing new features, and, sometimes, a mixture of both. The company named its latest such release the Catalyst 14.12 Omega.



With 2013-14, AMD stopped releasing WHQL-signed Catalyst releases on a near-monthly basis and switched to a slower, almost quarterly Catalyst WHQL release cycle, with updates building on each of those WHQL releases rolling out as betas and hotfixes. Some of those betas ship with some very important game optimizations and are sometimes so far away from being incorporated into a WHQL release that hardware reviewers like us have, at times, been forced to keep our bench up to date with those betas. AMD's Catalyst 14.12 Omega is one such release. The driver we got ahead of its December 9th 2014 launch isn't WHQL-signed and comes with a curious version string.

AMD's Catalyst 14.12 Omega consists of a combination of new software features that spice up the feature-set of AMD's Radeon GPUs; and on paper, a handful of game-specific performance updates have also been included. AMD focused on three areas in this release: new features, performance updates, and improvements to image quality.

Features

The first major feature introduced is Virtual Super Resolution (VSR). This is really a "me-too" of NVIDIA's Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) feature introduced with its GeForce GTX 900 series GPUs. It lets you simulate higher resolutions than what your display can handle. The 3D app's output is of a higher resolution than what your display supports, while the driver intelligently scales it down to your display's resolution, giving you a sense of detail. VSR is essentially a glorified super-sampling feature.



AMD's implementation works much like NVIDIA's, with one difference: VSR is a global setting in Catalyst Control Center, while NVIDIA GeForce Experience offers it as an app-specific setting. With VSR enabled, you'll need to launch your 3D app to set its output resolution above what your display supports. VSR acts as a layer between the app and your physical display, which prevents your monitor from going out of sync. VSR is supported on the Radeon R9 290X, R9 290, R9 295X2, and R9 285. AMD also introduced new frame-pacing enhancements, which give you a more fluid display output with 3D apps and eliminate the micro-stutter AMD GPUs earned some flack for.



The second major feature introduced is AMD Fluid Motion Video. This is a highly specific feature that works to smooth out Blu-ray playback with Cyberlink PowerDVD 14. At this point, no other software we know of can take advantage of this feature. It uses GPU compute to interpolate "inferred" frames with real frames in a Blu-ray playback, increasing frame-rates and, in turn, overall smoothness. It can be enabled in Catalyst Control Center and comes with a slider.



The third notable feature is video Contour Removal. Designed for compressed video, it appears to be a pixel shader code that works to remove compression artifacts in, particularly, "repetitive" portions of the frame (eg: clear blue sky) without affecting details in non-repetitive portions. Unlike Fluid Motion Video, it is designed for compressed video and works with any video player that can output through DXVA. VideoLAN Client, a popular open-source player, works with this feature.



1080p Detail Enhancement is the fourth notable feature, and it is comprised of a set of video image quality enhancements, such as edge-enhancement, mosquito-noise reduction, and de-blocking. FullHD to UltraHD is another neat feature as it improves the quality of 1080p videos that have been upscaled to 2160p. It's essentially an upscaling pixel-shader algorithm, like the ones MadVR gives you, only this one isn't as taxing. Subjectively, the upscale quality is comparable to some of the basic levels of the "Jinc" algorithm. To use it, simply play 1080p videos on a 4K Ultra HD display via a DXVA-enabled player, such as VLC or MPC-Home Cinema.



Catalyst 14.12 Omega introduces 5K (5120 x 2880 pixels) display support for Windows. AMD GPUs already support this resolution on Apple's Retina iMac. This driver preps your Windows PC up for aftermarket 5K displays, such as the Dell UltraSharp UP2715K. Just don't expect to play AAA games using your R9 285 or any single AMD GPU. And no, you cannot VSR 5K onto a lower-resolution 4K display. We tried.

Performance: Test Setup

AMD speaks of performance improvements in addition to those image-quality enhancing features. One of its more colorful slides speaks of "up to 19 percent performance improvements," which should have you raise your eyebrows; that is, until you spot the fineprint, which reads "since launch driver." Our hearts go out those who haven't updated their AMD graphics driver over the past year.



We put these drivers through a quick spin on our reference Radeon R9 290 graphics card, with 3DMark 11, 3DMark Firestrike, Sniper Elite III, Battlefield 4, and Ryse: Son of Rome. Battlefield 4 runs DICE's latest Frostbite engine, while Ryse: Son of Rome runs the latest CryEngine from CryTek. All three games are set to run in DirectX 11 mode. We compared AMD's Catalyst 14.12 Omega to its immediate predecessor, the Catalyst 14.11.2 beta, because someone still running Catalyst 13.12 is an unlikely occurrence (it makes games such as Battlefield 4 with the post-Mantle update and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare unplayable).

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.