AMD releases Catalyst 10.12

Today AMD released the Catalyst 10.12 driver for all current AMD Radeon, Mobility Radeon, and FireStream products.

New features are especially relevant to mobile users who watch DivX-encoded movies: DivX is now GPU accelerated, reducing CPU load and extending battery life.

The full release notes:

New Features:

• Support for DivX on the AMD Radeon 6800 Series
  • With DivX® software installed on an AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 Series and later GPU and the DivX Accelerated™ solution, consumers can enjoy an improved DivX video playback experience by lowering CPU load, extending computer battery life on notebooks, reducing noise on home theater PCs and improving overall computer operation.
  • Grab the DivX Accelerated download from here (will be available Dec 15)  http://go.divx.com/accelerated
• Support for OpenGL 4.1
  • New features introduced in OpenGL 4.1
  • Full compatibility with OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs for easier porting between mobile and desktop platforms
  • The ability to query and load a binary for shader program objects to save re-compilation time
  • The capability to bind programs individually to programmable stages for programming flexibility
  • 64-bit floating-point component vertex shader inputs for higher geometric precision
  • Multiple viewports for a rendering surface for increased rendering flexibility
  • New ARB extensions introduced with OpenGL 4.1
  • Linking OpenGL sync objects to OpenCL event objects for enhanced OpenCL interoperability
  • The ability to set stencil values in a fragment shader for enhanced rendering flexibility
  • Features to improve robustness, for example when running WebGL applications
  • Callback mechanisms to receive enhanced errors and warning messages
• AMD Stream 2.3 SDK release
  • Performance improvements for AMD’s OpenCL toolset
  • Support UVD video hardware component through OpenCL driver (Windows 7 only)
  • Support for the Stream Profiler on Linux (command line version)
  • Support added for AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series and AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series
  • Support for FFT and BLAS-3 libraries
  • Stream Profiler enhancements (including timeline visualization)
  • Resolves a number of bug fixes from the Stream SDK 2.2 release

Resolved Known Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System
This section provides information on resolved known issues in this release of the AMD Catalyst™ 10.12 software suite for Windows 7. These include:

• DivX interlaced content no longer intermittently shows corruption.
• Tom Clancy’s Endwar no longer randomly hangs during game cutscenes.
• Crossfire no longer gets randomly disabled in some games after task switching.
• Random black streaks are no longer seen on menus in Metro 2033.
• Corruption is no longer randomly seen with certain graphical settings in F1 2010.
• Screen is now rendered correctly in Splinter Cell Conviction with Crossfire enabled.
• Random tearing is no longer observed when playing back XVID video files on an extended display.
• Random crashes are no longer observed when playing the Stone Giant DX11 Demo when Crossfire enabled.
• Random crashes are no longer observed when changing video settings in Supreme Commander 2.
• Need for Speed Shift no longer displays random corruption during game play if 2 races are played consecutively without exiting the game.
• WMV playback no longer goes blank occasionally after switching from 32bit to 16bit color.
• Random mouse cursor corruption is no longer seen
• The screen is does not intermittently display garbage when running 3dMark06.
• Dragon Age Origins no longer hangs intermittently during gameplay.
• Changing resolutions in Starcraft2 with forced AA no longer causes random application crashes.
• The desktop does not darken occasionally after exiting Eve Online.
• The desktop does not dim randomly after exiting Mafia II on some Radeon 4890 products.

Resolved Known Issues for the Windows Vista  Operating System

• The overscan/underscan slider is no longer occasionally disabled in certain optimized / customer modes.
• Enabling dynamic contrast no longer displays random fade-in effects when playing Yozakura.

Resolved Known Issues for the Windows XP Operating System

• The water surface in World of Warcraft no longer displays random corruption when Anti Aliasing is enabled.

Random flickering is no longer observed in F1 2010 in systems with Crossfire enabled and forced Anti Aliasing enabled in the Catalyst™ Control Center.

In addition to the driver release, a preview version of the new Catalyst Control Center is now available. This is a beta version of the new UI for CCC, which makes everything much more accessible. AMD’s Product Marketing Manager for Radeon, Robert Hallock, says,

The new UI was designed by a company called Infusion, an international design house that has done work for companies like Microsoft, Humana, Conoco Phillips, the 2016 Chicago Olympics bid and more.

We also shipped Catalyst 10.12 out to a software testing group named Perseus Labs. They pitted Cat 10.12 against competing WHQL drivers using the Microsoft Windows Logo Kit (WLK) and Windows Hardware Quality Lab (WHQL) tests, and found that only Catalyst 10.12 passed every test without failures or system crashes.

As always, you can get the drivers and CCC preview on AMD’s site.