AMD RELEASING CATALYST 14.2 BETA
Launch driver for Thief
THIEF launches today (February 25th), and it’s an exclusive partner of the AMD Gaming Evolved program. Throughout development of the PC and console versions of the game, this exciting reimagining of a classic franchise was built with AMD Radeon™ products in mind. At launch, AMD Radeon customers will have day-one support for: 4K gaming, AMD Eyefinity technology, AMD CrossFire technology and advantageous DirectX® 11 performance. In addition, everyone will benefit from the Square/AMD collaboration through a host of graphical effects:
Compute shader-accelerated depth of field for realistic focal lengths
Silhouette-enhancing tessellation to improve character geometry
Complex shadowing systems to support THIEF’s dependence on shadows as a core gameplay mechanic. This is a great example of rendering technology supporting an integral element of the game! A notable percentage of the game’s rendering budget has been spent on the novel shadowing algorithms.
SSAA for buttery smooth edges.
As a reminder, THIEF will be patched to support Mantle and AMD TrueAudio technologies in early March.
IMPROVEMENTS TO MANTLE AND MORE
Hangs and stuttering resolved for the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4™; users are now encouraged to try mGPU
Multi-GPU frame pacing in Battlefield 3™ and Battlefield 4™ is now enabled for non-XDMA configurations running resolutions >1600p.
We fixed Minecraft! Sorry about that, builders.
Intermittent hangs and crashes should be resolved in 3D applications
In other driver news, I wanted to tell you about some exciting driver developments from the Linux side of the house. These developments do not specifically related to Catalyst 14.2 Beta, but we’re nevertheless quite proud of them and hope you’ll pass on the word to your readers. Of late, we’ve committed the following changes to the X.ORG ‘radeon’ repository—our open source driver:
Video Compression Engine (VCE) enabled for compatible GPU and APU products (e.g. GCN-based SKUs). Hardware-accelerated encode of H.264 now possible for 1080p60 content
Video decode (UVD) performance and efficiency improvements for the AMD R9 290/290X, R9 260X, “Kaveri” and “Kabini”
X-Video hardware video acceleration via the GLAMOR library now supported
2D acceleration via the GLAMOR library now enabled by default
Substantial improvements to overall video transcode times for hardware-accelerated transcoding apps
Tiling support now enabled on all GCN-based products
Substantial OpenGL feature level upgrade to v4.3
Major contributions to the Linux kernel 3.14 to improve dynamic power management, DisplayPort robustness and power efficiency on all GCN-based hardware
New programming guides and register specifications released for HD 5000, 6000, 7000 and R9/R7 Series GPUs. This will enable volunteer and professional developers to contribute to the X.ORG OSS Radeon driver, and can facilitate porting to other non-Linux platforms.
In all, it’s an exciting week for the Windows and OSS Linux Radeon drivers! We hope you’ll enjoy playing, testing and enjoying THIEF—the latest AAA title optimized for AMD Radeon.