Wednesday, January 26th 2011
AMD Catalyst 11.1 WHQL and 11.1a Hotfix Formally Announced
AMD today formally introduced Catalyst 11.1 WHQL software suite and Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix update. AMD Catalyst installs drivers and system software for ATI/AMD Radeon graphics processors (HD 2000 series and above), AMD chipset integrated graphics, and other ATI multimedia products. The Catalyst 11.1 WHQL finalizes the new Catalyst Control Center (referred to so far as CCC2), as the default control center, which simplifies control for mainstream and advanced users. It also formally introduces support for OpenGL 4.1. Catalyst 11.1 WHQL adds performance updates to F1 2010 and Left 4 Dead 2, the performance increments are more for the HD 6000 series GPUs. Next up is the 11.1a Hotfix update, which packs all the features of 11.1, plus performance improvements for Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs. It also adds new tessellation level controls. A number of Catalyst AI texture filtering updates are also added.
DOWNLOAD:
AMD Catalyst 11.1 WHQL
Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix Update
A list of changes follows.
Highlights of the AMD Catalyst 11.1 Windows release include:
New Features:
DOWNLOAD:
AMD Catalyst 11.1 WHQL
Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix Update
A list of changes follows.
Highlights of the AMD Catalyst 11.1 Windows release include:
New Features:
- The new Catalyst Control Center
o The new Catalyst Control Center enables a simplified user experience to help users get the most out of their AMD product
o Easily enable 3D settings to enhance game image quality
o Setup multiple displays to increase productivity
o Adjust power settings to increase battery life
o Supports two unique views - designed for mainstream and advanced users
o User Interface dynamically updates based on available AMD hardware - Support for OpenGL 4.1
o New features introduced in OpenGL 4.1
o Full compatibility with OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs for easier porting between mobile and desktop platforms
o The ability to query and load a binary for shader program objects to save re-compilation time
o The capability to bind programs individually to programmable stages for programming flexibility
o 64-bit floating-point component vertex shader inputs for higher geometric precision
o Multiple viewports for a rendering surface for increased rendering flexibility
- F1 2010:
o Performance increases up to 12% on AMD Radeon HD 6900 and AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.
o Performance increases up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled. - Left 4 Dead 2:
o Performance increases up to 17% on AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series single and Crossfire configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.
o Performance increases up to 8% on AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series single configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.
- Performance improvements for the AMD Radeon HD 6800 & HD 6900 series in a number of applications
- Catalyst Control Center - New Tessellation controls
- Gives users full control over the tessellation levels used in applications
- Catalyst AI Texture Filtering updates
- The Quality setting has now been improved to match the High Quality setting in all respects but one; it enables an optimization that limits tri-linear anisotropic filtering to areas surrounding texture mipmap level transitions, while doing bilinear anisotropic filtering elsewhere. This optimization offers a way to improve filtering performance without visibly affecting image quality
- The Performance setting has also been updated to address comments about the sharpness of the default Quality setting causing shimmering in certain cases. It now provides a smoother filtering option that eliminates most shimmering while preserving the improved detail provided by anisotropic filtering.
92 Comments on AMD Catalyst 11.1 WHQL and 11.1a Hotfix Formally Announced
I reached a point when gaming is not so important and some support for adobe cs5 suite or vegas pro or edius or anything could be helpfull , no matter what graphic card you get from Ati they don't have the extra things Nvidia has like export a damn project/movie in half the time it would take if only cpu was used.
When i gamed a lot i felt physx is not so important and those few extra fixes and stability Nvidia always had in front of Ati wasn't such a big deal but now i'm just sick of waiting maybe in the new driver Ati would implement some support for GPU encoding in pro edititing software , or some gamers would think maybe some physics platform would come from the new driver , promises that keep going for years.
My graphic card is a bit old and i will go to green camp not even looking back.
old driver i used was 10.10, sounds fun :ohwell:
Are MLAA options maybe by some fluke oww enabled on 48xx series?
*hopes*
As for people seeing weird Catalyst versions, mine says 10.12. Try completely uninstalling all ATI drivers/files before installing either of these new ones.
ATI supports direct compute and openCL, so if these pro editing programs wanted to get ATI hardware acceleration, its entirely possible... but they want their Nvidia sponsorship.
11.1 worked great, tried 11.1a and it crashed my system to blue screen.. few reboots and reinstalls later it gives me an error when running ccc. so i totally use every driver cleaner and uninstall known to mankind only finding that 11.1a (like 10.12a) and several other drivers simply dont work. back to 11.1, hope the enhancements were not that great for 69xx cards since i have one and can't use em.
fyi i did totally reinstall windows and the same exact thing happened so the ccc installer just does not like my setup - mini-itx, i5 760, 6950.
Hope you can get them working, cause the performance increase is pretty good.
sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_win7-64.aspx
Perhaps it's just nit-picking, but when a company can't get something as basic as the version number correct, it doesn't fill you with confidence in the quality of the rest of their code...
I just upgraded to 11.1 official, and YES it does have this problem.
STRANGELY something is up with 11.1a - mine thinks its 10.10 now (10.12 was what i had last)