AMD Catalyst 10.3 released, big changes afoot

Robert Hallock 17 Mar, 2010 at 3:27pm ET Article published in Tech

AMD has today released a “preview driver,” Catalyst 10.3, which brings a great many improvements and changes to the Radeon series for the month of March.

The official release notes have been reproduced in full below, but there are additional undocumented changes that should be reviewed as well:

ATI Catalyst™ support for ATI Mobility Radeon™ Premium Graphics solutions

This release of ATI Catalyst™ introduces support for the production version of Windows® 7 and Windows® Vista for notebooks featuring the ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 2000 Series, ATI Mobility™ Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4000 Series, and ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5000 Series of products.

Supported by most major OEM and ODM notebook manufacturers

For Desktop Graphics

64-bit Windows 7/Vista

32-bit Windows 7/Vista

For Notebook Graphics

64-bit Windows 7/Vista

32-bit Windows 7/Vista

ATI Catalyst Control Center – ATI Eyefinity technology enhancements

Display Bezel Compensation

Easy-to-use wizard shows users how to adjust their display layout to remove the pixels occupied by their display bezels

Per-Display Color Adjust

Individual Color, Brightness and Contrast controls

Multiple ATI Eyefinity Groups

Create more than one ATI Eyefinity group from multiple displays

Improved Display Configuration switching

Support for ATI Eyefinity groups and the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center profile manager

Easy to toggle between cloned and extended desktop modes

ATI Catalyst™ support for 3D Stereoscopic glasses

AMD has updated it’s Direct3D (Quad buffer support) driver to enable 3rd party middleware vendors such as iZ3D to output stereo L/R images at 120 Hz (60 Hz per eye)

Comments

17 Mar 2010 ~ 3:33pm Snarkasm Damnit. I couldn't care less about 3% improvements in $RANDOM_GAME. I would, however, like a driver that doesn't cause sporadic gray screens and throws my color calibration out the window.

Pretty please?
17 Mar 2010 ~ 3:35pm Sledgehammer70 I thought they fixed the gray screen of graphic death?
17 Mar 2010 ~ 3:38pm Snarkasm Not in 10.2, at least - I see it when I game. Not always, but enough to kill me if I'm in TF2. It recovers after a minute or two, but it's pretty annoying.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 3:40pm MAGIC I just put win7 64 bit on a family members laptop with 10.2 and the graphics driver continuously crashes and recovers. I really hope this fixes that issue.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 3:42pm Sledgehammer70 I got it all the time with my 5970 so I said peace to the card and sold it. It maybe DX11 but whats the point if it crashes all the time?
17 Mar 2010 ~ 3:44pm UPSLynx I get the crash error while playing Borderlands, to the point where it locks up the game for a little while. Very annoying.

I wonder if ATI is going to setting in with their own 3D solution any time soon. This driver adds support for 3rd party options, but I'd think ATI would want to get their own deal going before too long. NVIDIA has 3D Vision, which is really the only major kit for 3D on PC right now.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 3:46pm Tushon Ugh, I'm not happy hearing these crash reports. My mobo should be coming back from RMA soon, and I exchanged my GTX 285 for a single 5770 (was planning on buying a second one in the next month) .... but this is discouraging. Hopefully, I won't encounter the problems you rich kids with your new-fangled giant cards get into.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 3:54pm Cliff_Forster Do you guys know how to properly upgrade a graphics driver?

My 5870 plays everything like butter and never crashes, ever. I have been using it for months, I have yet to see a VPU recovery screen. I'm running 10.1 right now.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 3:54pm Garg I'm not having any problems with 10.1 on my 5770, but I only play 2 games and fold. I might give 10.3 a try since there seem to be some performance increases.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 3:56pm Thrax

Cliff_Forster wrote:

Do you guys know how to properly upgrade a graphics driver?

My 5870 plays everything like butter and never crashes, ever. I have been using it for months, I have yet to see a VPU recovery screen. I'm running 10.1 right now.

Double click exe, wait, reboot. If it's anything more complicated than that, the manufacturer has failed.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 4:03pm Jengo I love how they are paying attention to the people with the 4800 series cards, this really makes me happy!
17 Mar 2010 ~ 4:07pm Snarkasm I love how condescending Cliff is.

You know how capable we all are, sir. Let's not get snippy - AMD's drivers have plain sucked out loud for many people lately.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 4:25pm Cliff_Forster

Snarkasm wrote:

I love how condescending Cliff is.

You know how capable we all are, sir. Let's not get snippy - AMD's drivers have plain sucked out loud for many people lately.

Oh, its was just a light troll, roll with it

Honestly, for me, I'm not making this up, I have not had a single issue. Now, I'm not as critical about color accuracy as you are, so I can understand that issue, but constant VPU crashes? I have been using a 5870 for months not a single VPU recovery error, I install Radeon graphics in every system I build for others and they have not had problems that I am aware of.

Now, when I update drivers I do it the old fashioned way cleaning the old one out, but I'm just silly like that.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 4:39pm Snarkasm I've had no problems with an xbox 360, but you don't consider that normal, either.

I don't know if it's constant VPU crashes - one of my screens goes gray, the other goes a lovely shade of peach or salmon, everything freezes and sound loops for a couple of minutes - but then everything goes back to normal and I'm good to go. To me, it seems like a possible overheating issue, but case and GPU temps report fine, so... :shrug:.

When I had driver recoveries using a GTX2whateverthehellIwasrunning, Windows would always tell me nicely that my graphics driver had failed and come back - no such notifications here, which is why I'm not certain it's a VPU crash and recovery.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 4:55pm Cliff_Forster

Snarkasm wrote:

I've had no problems with an xbox 360, but you don't consider that normal, either.

Well played
17 Mar 2010 ~ 5:03pm GooD

Thrax wrote:

Double click exe, wait, reboot. If it's anything more complicated than that, the manufacturer has failed.

Soooooo true !
17 Mar 2010 ~ 5:11pm Cyclonite Nothing for Battlefield: Bad Company 2. My load times are atrocious. I can't get into games until people have already capped a point. It's definitely not memory, CPU, or hard drive. Many sites have locked it down to how ATI handles shaders. /shrug. Maybe it will make a difference, but they didn't list it.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 5:40pm Thrax

Cyclonite wrote:

Nothing for Battlefield: Bad Company 2. My load times are atrocious. I can't get into games until people have already capped a point. It's definitely not memory, CPU, or hard drive. Many sites have locked it down to how ATI handles shaders. /shrug. Maybe it will make a difference, but they didn't list it.

ATI driver lead Terry Makedon acknowledged today on Twitter that it's an outstanding issue and that the company is working on resolving it.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 5:53pm Sledgehammer70 Overall I have tested a few ATI cards. When they work they are awesome cards, but when they don't like I ran into.. its beyond annoying. Even with Nvidia's snafu with 196.75 their drivers I can still play my games and not have random driver crashes & gray screens.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 6:00pm Thrax Just a dead video card, which I'm sure is much better.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 7:04pm Buldwren I've been getting 'grey screens of death' as other Windows 7 5000 series users call them - often. I hope the 10.3 drivers address the issue, or a hotfix is released soon.
18 Mar 2010 ~ 3:24am Ian Hmm I might have lucked out on my new build cause I haven't had a single problem with my HD5850...along with my 4 year old xbox360 =D
18 Mar 2010 ~ 4:45am Sledgehammer70

Cyclonite wrote:

Nothing for Battlefield: Bad Company 2. My load times are atrocious. I can't get into games until people have already capped a point. It's definitely not memory, CPU, or hard drive. Many sites have locked it down to how ATI handles shaders. /shrug. Maybe it will make a difference, but they didn't list it.

ATI & Nvidia have had problems with the CPU & GPU accessing the same data files. Nvidia found away around this and it allows their product to stream the files on GPU & CPU at the same time. ATI has not resolved this issue. It is a work around that they will hot fix. This issue is occurring not only in BFBC2.

Thrax wrote:

Just a dead video card, which I'm sure is much better.

It only affected a few cards from a small group of cards. A bunch of people blew it up trying to get new cards from Nvidia... pretty sad what people will do in a tight economy. But even if I did get a dead card all my products I buy retain a lifetime warranty.
18 Mar 2010 ~ 9:38am mirage

Cliff_Forster wrote:

Well played

Exemplary sportsmanship
20 Mar 2010 ~ 7:09pm Jengo how come all the links take to you to the mobility drivers? Even the "Desktop" ones?
21 Mar 2010 ~ 10:28am Cyclonite

Sledgehammer70 wrote:

ATI & Nvidia have had problems with the CPU & GPU accessing the same data files. Nvidia found away around this and it allows their product to stream the files on GPU & CPU at the same time. ATI has not resolved this issue. It is a work around that they will hot fix. This issue is occurring not only in BFBC2.

Thanks, Sledge. That's a much better explanation than I could find.
21 Mar 2010 ~ 8:13pm ardichoke I wonder if 10.3 will fix the problem with NWN crashing at launch every time. I just had to roll back from 10.2 to 10.1 just so I could play my weekly campaign
17 Apr 2010 ~ 2:06am lordbean Curious to hear about all these issues people are having - I've used every catalyst version except 10.2 (which I somehow managed to skip) on my dual HD5850 configuration, and whether running crossfired or stand-alone for more monitors, synchronous or asynchronous clock speeds, I have yet to see a gray-screen or VPU reset.

Knock on wood, I guess. Still got my GTX 285 if all else fails.
17 Apr 2010 ~ 5:15am ardichoke 10.3 fixed whatever issue caused Neverwinter Nights to crash. This makes me a very happy camper.