AMD Catalyst 11.8 let loose

Brian Ambrozy 17 Aug, 2011 at 2:04pm ET Article published in Tech

A new month means a new driver release from AMD, which today happens to be Catalyst 11.8.

The new driver provides a smattering of performance improvements, with the big one weighing in at 30% for games running under AMD’s morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA) algorithm. Call of Duty: Black Ops and Crysis 2 users may also see some love, depending on the settings. Radeon HD 5000 Series users are also likely to rejoice, as all of this month’s enhancements apply to them as well.

On the bug fix front, Starcraft 2 users who play with anti-aliasing will no longer be treated to black screens, 3DMark 11 has been purged of its random BSODs and hardware video acceleration has been inspired to work correctly on recent versions of VLC.

For more information on today’s release, the official release notes await your pleasure, while the topic du jour awaits your download.

(Ed note: Users running Eyefinity 5×1 Portrait should remain with the recent Catalyst 11.8 Preview Driver until the technology is certified for WHQL drivers later this year).

Comments

17 Aug 2011 ~ 2:27pm fatcat I love that AMD is rolling out driver updates quickly, but for the 11.9's or 12.x's can we get rid of all the "known issues" and just release a "DOES IT ALL GREAT" driver?

AMD wrote:

Known issues under the Windows 7 operating system
The following section provides a summary of open issues that may be experienced under the Windows 7 operating system in the latest version of AMD Catalystâ„¢. These include:
STALKER - Call of Pripyat may randomly hang when entering a new or saved game.
Random corruption may be observed when running the Unigine Heaven benchmark in Fixed High Performance mode.
F1 2010 may randomly hang on application launch.
Battlefield â€“ Bad Company 2 may randomly hang after a period of game play.
Dungeon Siege 3 may randomly hang on application launch.
Dead Rising 2 may randomly hang on application launch.
Random flashing may be observed while playing F1 2010 and Dirt 2.
OpenGL acceleration may not function within Photoshop CS5.

Known Issues under the Windows Vista Operating System
The following section provides a summary of open issues that may be experienced under the Windows Vista operating system in the latest version of AMD Catalystâ„¢. These include:
Windows Aero options may not be available after installing the driver.
Doom 3 and Quake 4 may experience graphical corruption.
Performing Bezel compensation in certain Eyefinity configurations may cause some bezel groups to not appear
17 Aug 2011 ~ 2:28pm Thrax At least we publish our known issues.
17 Aug 2011 ~ 2:45pm Ryder @Fatcat, being able to eradicate all "known issues" is every software devs dream.
17 Aug 2011 ~ 3:13pm fatcat

Thrax wrote:

At least we publish our known issues.

Ryder wrote:

being able to eradicate all "known issues" is every software devs dream.

I demand everyone in the computer industry get together and make ONE standard for every piece of hardware, software, etc.

and call it... Steam 2.0
17 Aug 2011 ~ 3:34pm Cliff_Forster Known issues under Windows Vista..... User is using Windows Vista.....
17 Aug 2011 ~ 3:51pm fatcat

Cliff_Forster wrote:

Known issues under Windows Vista..... User is using Windows Vista.....

I didn't cut n paste them all. there are ones for WinXP also man
17 Aug 2011 ~ 5:16pm Tushon Known issue: After installing, IE6 will hang randomly upon launching
19 Aug 2011 ~ 12:21am GooD *sarcasm on* The only thing that should hang on a IE6 user is the user itself *sarcasm off* lol

Okay maybe Tim can get an exception for being... Tim
3 Sep 2011 ~ 5:50am maninred Think of the linux bugs,
it makes not happy when the system get crashed!
19 Sep 2011 ~ 12:37pm BliZz Installed AMD Catalyst 11.8 , tried to run Starcraft 2 , boom PC restarts , several times .. so i went back to 11.6 , but all other games worked well , but SC2 is kinda too important .. (same issue with 11.7)