Advanced Micro Devices is releasing a new version of its Catalyst graphics driver that improves the gaming experience for owners of AMD graphics cards. The move shows that the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD, one of the largest makers of graphics chips, can improve the experience of gamers using software improvements rather than hardware changes alone.
The free Catalyst Omega driver is a special edition of the driver software that has 20 new features and fixes in the latest version, which has been downloaded more than 80 million times to date. One of the biggest improvements is downsampling, or rendering a game for the best possible display and then making it fit on the user’s actual display. Owners should notice a 19 percent overall performance improvement with AMD Radeon graphics cards and up to 29 percent performance improvements on AMD’s accelerated processing units (APUs).
“If you have a 1080p monitor, we can render the video at a much better resolution, then the card will scale the image down to fit the user’s display,” said AMD global technical marketing lead Robert Hallock in an interview with GamesBeat. “The result is the user will get full-screen, supersampled anti-aliasing in any game that they play.”
That means that the images will look better, as you can see in the picture at the bottom. AMD calls this feature Virtual Super Resolution, or VSR. AMD can render an image for a game at up to 4K resolution and then display the video at the lower resolution supported by the available monitor. VSR is game-and-engine agnostic. The graphics processing units that this change supports include the AMD FirePro, AMD Radeon HD 7000-series, and the AMD Radeon R-series.
“We’ll let gamers tap into extra performance for free,” Hallock said. “This is the one driver this year that you really want to update, if you don’t do it regularly.”
Another new feature is artifact removal in compressed images. When a YouTube video has an artifact, for instance, the driver will remove it and try to fix the problem so the viewer doesn’t notice it.
AMD has a new infrastructure for testing, and this driver is the first one vetted under the new procedures. It increased its automated testing by 61 percent, in terms of checking for crashes and blue screens. It detects stuttering, or slowing of frame rates in games. AMD has increased manual error checking by 12 percent and it has added more test configurations for different kinds of hardware. And it has added 10 percent more screen sizes in resolution.
The result, Hallock said, is that newly released drivers should cause fewer problems for gamers.
AMD is regularly announcing driver updates for major games like Far Cry 4. But this is the first time it is doing a massive update independent of any particular game release.
