Thursday, January 17th 2013
AMD Catalyst 13.1 WHQL Drivers Released
AMD posted its first major release of the Catalyst software suite for this year, Catalyst 13.1 WHQL. Much along the lines of its 12.11 "Never Settle" driver, the new 13.1 WHQL brings performance enhancements for a boatload of games, targeting Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs based on the Graphics CoreNext (GCN) architecture. We know that AMD is yet to unlock the full potential of GCN, and 13.1 WHQL appears to be a step in that direction. In addition to performance enhancements and fixes, AMD introduced a new 3D settings and profile management user interface within Catalyst Control Center (CCC).
DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 13.1 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit
A slice of the change-log follows.
Performance Highlights of AMD Catalyst 13.1 (vs. AMD Catalyst 12.10): Includes all of the performance improvements found in AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11
Performance gains seen on the entire AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series, with all game being tested at high / extreme / ultra levels:
This section provides information on resolved known issues in this release of the AMD Catalyst 13.1 software suite.
DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 13.1 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit
A slice of the change-log follows.
Performance Highlights of AMD Catalyst 13.1 (vs. AMD Catalyst 12.10): Includes all of the performance improvements found in AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11
Performance gains seen on the entire AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series, with all game being tested at high / extreme / ultra levels:
- Enhanced performance in Far Cry 3 (up to 25% with 8xMSAA, SSAO enabled @ 1600p, and up to 15% with 8xMSAA, HDAO enabled @1600p) (AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 must also be installed)
- Enhanced AMD CrossFire scaling performance in Call of Duty Black Ops 2
- Up to 10%-15% more performance in Battlefield 3 in most cases
- More than 20% in certain missions and sequences (Comrades)
- Up to 7% more performance in Metro 2033
- Up to 10% more performance in DiRT Showdown
- Up to 8% more performance in Sleeping Dogs
- Up to 12% more performance in Civilization V
- Up to 10% more performance in StarCraft II
- Up to 8% more performance in Sniper Elite: V2
- Up to 5% more performance in Max Payne 3
- 3DMark 06 - Up to 6%
- 3DMark Vantage - Up to 15%
- 3DMark 11 - Up to 12%
- AvP - Up to 11%
- Battlefield 3 - Up to 25%
- Call of Duty: Black Ops - Up to 13%
- Crysis 2: Up to 45%
- DiRT Showdown - Up to 62%
- ETQW - Up to 8%
- Hard Reset - Up to 8%
- Just Cause 2 - Up to 90%
- Mafia 2 - Up to 40%
- The Chronicles of Riddick - Up to 4%
- Shogun 2 - Up to 56%
- StarCraft 2 - Up to 25%
- Skyrim - Up to 45%
- Sniper Elite V2 - Up to 60%
- Tom Clancy's HAWX - Up to 56%
- Unigine Heaven - Up to 33%
- Wolfenstein - Up to 9%
This section provides information on resolved known issues in this release of the AMD Catalyst 13.1 software suite.
- A sporadic system hang encountered with a single AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPU seen on X58 and X79 chipsets.
- An intermittent hang encountered with AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs in an AMD CrossFire + Eyefinity setup.
- Missing fonts in XBMC
- No video found in Media Player Classic Home Cinema when using full or half floating point processing
- Skyrim lighting (missing a lighting pass) for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series
- Skyrim cloud corruption experience in various in game locations
- A hang playing Dishonored on the AMD Radeon HD 6000 and AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series
- Engine and memory clocks running too high when the GPU is idle.
- GPU activity runs at lower values than expected seen on the AMD Radeon HD 7870.
- Corruption seen in Darkness 2 and Carrier Command when using AMD CrossFire configurations
- Adobe Premier Pro CS6 may fail to launch
- Hang experienced with AMD Crossfire and Eyefinity enabled on X58 and X78 chipsets
- Corel PaintShop Pro X3 - Hangs at the "Initializing Command Manager" window
- Company of Heroes 2 - display corruption experienced when AA is enabled in the AMD Catalyst Control Center
- Cyberlink Powerdirector 10 crashes intermittently.
- Company of Heroes : Tales of Valor - Flickering experienced when AA is disabled
- Max Payne 3 - Flickering experienced in DirectX 9 mode with forced AA enabled
- Cyberlink PoweDVD 10 - crashes intermittently
- VLC - Green texture corruption seen in 720p MPEG2 video clips
- Black screen encountered when "Alternate DVI mode" is enabled in the AMD Catalyst Control Center
- Green display corruption seen in Skype webcam video
82 Comments on AMD Catalyst 13.1 WHQL Drivers Released
Its the last update where ARMA II doesnt artifact and glitch the fuck out when in crossfire - Orcs Must Die 2 doesnt like crossfire though and it crashes the game. had to set up an individual profile for the game to disable crossfire before launching.
Good news is that I have a system image of the Win7 disk that I took a day before. Bad news is I didn't have a Win7 recovery disk burnt so I have to burn one now at work and try to recover my computer now...
Especially when I can play ALL existing games with only 1 card with no major issues. (50% of games don't work on this CF anyways...)
www.3dmark.com/3dm11/5614834
I have 5870 too, card can play almost all games, but about 10 games I keep for new graphic, best games I didn't try at all, like BF3, Far Cry 3, Borderland 2, Medal of Honor last,....
Because of that card work with 100% and fan is absolutely crazy I can't hear my self... Next is H220 is 680 Classified HC no more pain for me. I decide to sell H100 when H220 show up and I have loop for 140$ + 4x NEW Gentle Typhoon AP-45 2150 RPM from frozencpu....
I don't see improvement in scores.
Welcome to windows 8. You have now experienced the lies of the win8 lovers. :nutkick:
I couldn't even use it when testing. Immediately upon installing vid driver the screen would just blink off/on with AMD and Nvidia cards. Safe mode didn't work - at all. What a pile of shit!
Speaking of the driver itself, I can't download it without it being corrupted. edit: DE server worked, but not the others...
GIMME DAT GAME
I'm running 12.11, should I upgrade to this 13.1? Running my trusty HD 6970 :D
Kinda sad that I'm still here with a hardware general H.264 encoder in my 7770 that I can't use :|
Mine is a HD 6950. Tried a complete wipe of Catalyst and then install again, but same result.
Going to keep it for a bit and fiddle with afterburner. Perhaps a different overclock will work.
i tried these on my old rig with a 4870x2 , System crashed at VGA Init.....
used DriverSweeper by Guru3D.com Link
to get finally rid of all driver binarys since uninstall & co didn´t helped and still left System in unusable state.
rolled back to 12.6 since all newer are related to HD5000+ models
:toast:
HD7950
Only complaint I had about the 12.11 beta's was very occasional 2d flickering. 13.1's seemed to have fixed that as well.
My semi-stable card crashes faster with these drivers, and my good card works great. Maybe now they'll actually fix the card, this is the second RMA in two months on the same card.