AMD has released the February update for the Catalyst driver suite, appropriately dubbed 11.2. The new drivers support 32- and 64-bit versions of all editions of Windows from XP through 7.
From the release notes:
- AMD display driver version 8.821
- HydraVision for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7
- Southbridge/IXP Driver
- AMD Catalyst Control Center version 8.821
Highlights from the new Catalyst Control Center are
- 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 been updated to address 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.
- Tessellation Controls
- Supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series and the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
- New settings give users full control over the Tessellation levels used in applications.
- The default selection “AMD Optimized” setting is intended to set the best level of Tessellation on a per application basis. The “AMD Optimized” setting is designed to help users get the maximum visual benefit of Tessellation, while minimizing the performance impact associated with enabling Tessellation. Currently no applications have been profiled.
- The “Use Application Settings” option gives applications full control over the Tessellation level.
- Users can also manually set the maximum tessellation level used by applications with the slider control
- Morphological Anti-Aliasing support for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
- AMD Catalyst now includes official support for Morphological Anti-Aliasing for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
- Performance improvements in Call of Duty: Black Ops and Batman Arkham Asylum for Radeon HD 5000 Series single-card configurations
- Support Video Quality settings during Blu-ray 3D playback on AMD Radeon HD 6000 series
The full set of release notes, included resolved and outstanding issues for each Windows version can be found here.
The new Catalyst suite is available for all desktop and most mobile GPUs from the HD 2400 series to the most recent HD 6900 series. Owners of laptops from Toshiba, Sony, and Panasonic are at the mercy of the manufacturer as these are the only three who have opted out of AMD’s reference driver program and must wait for OEM versions of the driver package (Toshiba users are likely out of luck here). Also not compatible with this release are laptops with switchable graphics using Intel chipsets (Panasonic Toughbook users fall into this category).
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