catalyst 11.4 posted

[hclarkjr]

http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/downloads.aspx

Highlights of the AMD Catalyst 11.4 Windows release includes: New Features:
Enhancements to the AMD VISION Engine Control Center / AMD Catalyst Control Center

• New task based Display Management controls
  • Simplifies the configuration of displays and display settings
• New Eyefinity setup group
  • Setting up an Eyefinity group has never been easier
• AMD Catalyst update notification (found within the Information Center)
  • This feature notifies users that new AMD Catalyst software packages are available

GPU Compute enhancements:

• The OpenCL runtime (included in AMD Catalyst 11.4) includes performance enhancements supporting zero-copy on APUs and increased performance for PCIe transfers between a CPU and discrete GPU.

Performance Enhancements
A number of performance enhancements are seen with the AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series and AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series:

• Call of Duty Black Ops – gains of up to 15% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single GPU configurations.
• Battleforge – gains of up to 15% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Batman Arkham Asylum – gains of up to 20% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Aliens vs. Predator – gains of up to 8% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Civilization 5 – gains of up to 15% on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Far Cry 2 – gains of up to 6% on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Just Cause 2 – gains of up to 9% on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Lost Planet 2 – gains of up to 10% on single and multiple GPU configurations.

Resolved Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System
This section provides information on resolved known issues in this release of the AMD Catalyst 11.4 software suite for Windows 7. These include:

• The GPU no longer shows high GPU usage after running Firefox 4 with hardware acceleration enabled.
• Bioshock no longer displays random tearing and screen corruption with Vsync and MLAA enabled.
• Water textures no longer flicker in Two Worlds II in Crossfire mode.
• Bulletstorm lightshafts no longer appear broken when running on a HD 6970 series product.
• Bulletstorm no longer displays random texture corruption when running in Crossfire mode.
• FI 2010 no longer slows down intermittently when in Crossfire mode.
• PowerDVD no longer crashes if Crossfire is enabled / disabled during playback of a BD title.
• WinDVD no longer displays corrupted BD playback when the monitor is rotated to portrait mode.
• Crysis Warhead corruption is no longer randomly observed when launching the game.
• Running the Heaven benchmark no longer displays graphics corruption during DirectX 11 tests.
• Catalyst Control Center Avivo settings are now correctly displayed after connecting a secondary display.
• The Catalyst Control Center screen no longer flickers while adjusting screen brightness.

Resolved Issues for the Windows Vista Operating System
This section provides information on resolved known issues in this release of the AMD Catalyst 11.4 software suite for Windows Vista. These include:

• Mpeg2 video clips now use hardware acceleration when played using Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center.
• Adding bezel compensation to a 2x1 Eyefinity configuration no longer causes both displays to blank out.
• The Catalyst Control Center screen no longer flickers while adjusting screen brightness.

Resolved Issues for the Windows XP Operating System

• System no longer displays random corruption when playing World of Warcraft.
• Star Wars –The Force Unleashed no longer causes random system reboots.

Known issues under the Windows 7 operating system
The following section provides a summary of open issues that may be experienced under the Windows 7 operating system in the latest version of AMD Catalyst. These include:

• PowerDVD may randomly crash if HDMI 8 channel audio is enabled.
• The image may freeze if HD video is played over an extended period of time.
• Some BD content my not playback smoothly using WinDVD.
• Star Wars Jedi Knight II / Jedi Academy may randomly crash during game launch.
• OpenGL acceleration may not always function with Adobe Photoshop CS5.
• High GPU clock speeds may be retained after exiting a 3D application.
• PowerDVD my display random jitter when playing a 1080i BD video with Aero mode turned off.

Known Issues under the Windows Vista Operating System
The following section provides a summary of open issues that may be experienced under the Windows Vista operating system in the latest version of AMD Catalyst. These include:

• Windows Aero may be disabled after installing the driver.
• Doom 3 and Quake 4 may display random corruption with HD 4770 series products.

Known Issues under the Windows XP Operating System
The following section provides a summary of open issues that may be experienced under the Windows XP operating system in the latest version of AMD Catalyst. These include:

• Quake4 may display random screen flicker and texture corruption.
• The system may hang while playing Dead Rising 2.
• Civilization V may stop responding when Crossfire is enabled.
• Random graphics corruption may be observed while playing World of Warcraft.

 

[hclarkjr]

installed and running fine on my computer.

 

[Skurge]

installed and running fine on my computer.

Can you bench some of the games listed? If you have them.

 

[hclarkjr]

sorry, do not have any of those games.

 

[Barfo]

Performance improvements look interesting. Hopefully one of the review sites will run some benchmarks to compare with older drivers.

 

[mingsoup]

Can someone post a link to a review when a site puts one up? I'm gonna try em out.

 

[jhh979s]

Have they set the Over/Under scan slider setting to default at 0% yet? I have my PC hooked up to a 40" LCD TV and every time I install a new driver I have to manually set this to 0% as it defaults at 15% underscan.

 

[yacoub]

Have they set the Over/Under scan slider setting to default at 0% yet? I have my PC hooked up to a 40" LCD TV and every time I install a new driver I have to manually set this to 0% as it defaults at 15% underscan.

lol this. i would like to know this as well

 

[alcoholbob]

Still random flickering in Dawn of War II Retribution.

 

[Bill Brasky]

Have they fixed the cursor lag?

Oh, I see high gpu load after leaving 3d apps is still there. NVM.

 

[mingsoup]

I still can't use Catalyst Control Center as its giving me constant I/O that make my games stutter every 5 seconds via a Crossfire setup.

 

[Absolution75]

High GPU clock speeds may be retained after exiting a 3D application.

Seems pretty major if it keeps your fan running loud. Anyone notice anything?

 

[Bill Brasky]

Seems pretty major if it keeps your fan running loud. Anyone notice anything?

I had this in 11.2 and reverted so I'd be interested in hearing about this as well.

 

[Chiropteran]

Upgraded my main home PC and on my E-350 netbook. I didn't notice the fan running excessively after closing 3d games, although I only ran some WoW which isn't too hard on the system. I think they use the word *may* for a reason though, I can't imagine the bug occurs every single time for all software, otherwise it should be easy to troubleshoot and fix.

 

[formulav8]

I installed on a 5750 yesterday with no problems to report...

 

[Phynaz]

I still can't use Catalyst Control Center as its giving me constant I/O that make my games stutter every 5 seconds via a Crossfire setup.

There's something very wrong with your setup. I suggest a clean install.

 

[Bearach]

No problems thus far with these drivers, couldn't be bothered with the whole uninstall, run driver sweeper and such though. So far there isn't much difference.

I have noticed that an MMO I play sometimes, now loads the GPU (according to GPU-Z) by 28% max and drops to hardly any load, where as before it was 70% solid.

Idles still below 40, and no problems with the fan or CCC here. In fact pretty quiet. Doesn't really kick in much as the temperatures are not hitting very high. regardless of game.

 

[Muyoso]

I bought my first AMD/ATI card ever a couple of weeks ago, and I will NEVER again buy one of their products because of the utterly crappy drivers. I have one of those "new" 5850's from Sapphire and I run it in dual monitor mode.

Every time I load a webpage with flash, the second monitor flickers as its changing the memory clock. Same thing happens every time I play a video. This has been a known issue for years, and AMD/ATI has done nothing to fix it.

Sometimes when I exit a game, the GPU will get stuck at 99% utilization, which has been a known issue for YEARS, and AMD/ATI does nothing to fix it.

What DO they fix with their drivers? A couple minor issues in single games. What do they leave unfixed? These:

The image may freeze if HD video is played over an extended period of time.
High GPU clock speeds may be retained after exiting a 3D application.

NEVER had an issue like any of these with an Nvidia card. I am loving the performance of the 5850 i bought, but jesus the drivers are awful.

Edit: For the record, 11.4 fixed zero of my issues. I have had to do various things to mitigate them myself like disabling hardware acceleration in flash.

Edit 2: OH YEA, completely forgot about this. Has anyone with an ATI card seen their Event Viewer in Windows 7? Jesus christ ATI, thanks for logging literally 100 identical and useless events a freaking second while playing a game. Jesus the drivers are crap. I have had to disable all event logging from ATI because I am not going to have the crappy drivers logging a couple hundred thousand events a day in my Event Viewer rendering it useless and possibly harming my SSD in the process.

 

[moriz]

The reason why nvidia cards don't flicker with dual displays, is because they run at full power at all times, and thereby screwing up any power saving schemes.

So pick your poison.

 

[OVerLoRDI]

updated my 6950s to 11.4, things are running fine so far.

I'll be rolling out updates to my other boxes shortly.

 

[Bearach]

I bought my first AMD/ATI card ever a couple of weeks ago, and I will NEVER again buy one of their products because of the utterly crappy drivers. I have one of those "new" 5850's from Sapphire and I run it in dual monitor mode.

Every time I load a webpage with flash, the second monitor flickers as its changing the memory clock. Same thing happens every time I play a video. This has been a known issue for years, and AMD/ATI has done nothing to fix it.

Sometimes when I exit a game, the GPU will get stuck at 99% utilization, which has been a known issue for YEARS, and AMD/ATI does nothing to fix it.

What DO they fix with their drivers? A couple minor issues in single games. What do they leave unfixed? These:

The image may freeze if HD video is played over an extended period of time.
High GPU clock speeds may be retained after exiting a 3D application.

NEVER had an issue like any of these with an Nvidia card. I am loving the performance of the 5850 i bought, but jesus the drivers are awful.

Edit: For the record, 11.4 fixed zero of my issues. I have had to do various things to mitigate them myself like disabling hardware acceleration in flash.

Edit 2: OH YEA, completely forgot about this. Has anyone with an ATI card seen their Event Viewer in Windows 7? Jesus christ ATI, thanks for logging literally 100 identical and useless events a freaking second while playing a game. Jesus the drivers are crap. I have had to disable all event logging from ATI because I am not going to have the crappy drivers logging a couple hundred thousand events a day in my Event Viewer rendering it useless and possibly harming my SSD in the process.

I'm sorry about all your issues, but I had niggly issues too with my nVIDIA based graphics cards in dual monitor mode.

I don't know whether it's changed but there was simply sometimes where it just didn't work how I expected. Flickering happened also.

This happened with all my nVIDIA cards so I think you're lucky to "NEVER" have it happen.

Also the event viewer is limited to a set size, and quickly fills to that 20MB, so I find it a non-issue really.

Not sure how it will effect an SSD though, but you could turn off (like you have) and even limit the size further.

Perhaps you could set the 2D memory timings higher (like nVIDIA, according to some people) thus alleviating some of the problems?

 

[AMDScooter]

I installed them last night. No stability issues but I got some water texture flickering in BFBC2 that I had not gotten with the 11.3. Went back to the 11.3 and it's gone. My2c.

 

[Muyoso]

I'm sorry about all your issues, but I had niggly issues too with my nVIDIA based graphics cards in dual monitor mode.

I don't know whether it's changed but there was simply sometimes where it just didn't work how I expected. Flickering happened also.

This happened with all my nVIDIA cards so I think you're lucky to "NEVER" have it happen.

Also the event viewer is limited to a set size, and quickly fills to that 20MB, so I find it a non-issue really.

Not sure how it will effect an SSD though, but you could turn off (like you have) and even limit the size further.

Perhaps you could set the 2D memory timings higher (like nVIDIA, according to some people) thus alleviating some of the problems?

Oh yea, I am slowly finding fixes for all of the problems, but some of these are ridiculous to have in the first place. ATI has known for years now that for some reason its drivers spam anywhere from 20-100 events a second into the event viewer every time a video or game is played. I mean seriously what is even the point of this as they all say the same thing with zero useful information. I was just worried about the SSD writing tens of thousands of times a day needlessly, which simply cannot be good for it. Ended up having to disable all error reporting from ATI, which is not ideal.

As for the flickering, I know HOW to fix it, but am unsure if I want to mess with flashing the bios for something that is merely a slight annoyance. I have also had issues with Nvidia cards, but never any that affected in any way normal desktop use like browsing the internet or watching a video. Was a little unnerving to have my desktop flickering for seemingly no reason within a minute of starting up my machine with the new ATI card. The only other time I had ever seen that is when I had overclocked the hell out of Nvidia cards and damaged something.

11.4 seems to be running very well for me aside from these annoyances.

 

[Skurge]

Oh yea, I am slowly finding fixes for all of the problems, but some of these are ridiculous to have in the first place. ATI has known for years now that for some reason its drivers spam anywhere from 20-100 events a second into the event viewer every time a video or game is played. I mean seriously what is even the point of this as they all say the same thing with zero useful information. I was just worried about the SSD writing tens of thousands of times a day needlessly, which simply cannot be good for it. Ended up having to disable all error reporting from ATI, which is not ideal.

As for the flickering, I know HOW to fix it, but am unsure if I want to mess with flashing the bios for something that is merely a slight annoyance. I have also had issues with Nvidia cards, but never any that affected in any way normal desktop use like browsing the internet or watching a video. Was a little unnerving to have my desktop flickering for seemingly no reason within a minute of starting up my machine with the new ATI card. The only other time I had ever seen that is when I had overclocked the hell out of Nvidia cards and damaged something.

11.4 seems to be running very well for me aside from these annoyances.

You don't have to flash the bios. The flickering is a known issue with both AMD and nv. Whenever someone runs dual monitors it seems like they end up with a huge amount of problems. I think welshbloke can help you with the flickering. He had a similar problem with dual monitors. He didn't have to flash anything.

 

[Bearach]

Application found, was too old.