AMD pushes out first Catalyst update of the year

[Matthew DeCarlo]

AMD has pushed out 2010's first batch of Catalyst drivers, complete with the usual round of performance improvements and bug fixes. Catalyst 10.1 brings a 3% speed increase to Left 4 Dead 2 and Crysis on Radeon HD 5700-series cards, and a 4% to Crysis on the 5800-line.

Bug fixes span from Windows XP to Windows 7, and you can read the release notes here (PDF). A summary of the fixes along with download links is below:

• [Catalyst Control Center] The display order will now reflect changes properly when Eyefinity is re-arranged while desktop is rotated to portrait mode
• Hot unplugging one of the displays in an Eyefinity configuration no longer causes rotation modes to disappear from Catalyst Control Center
• [Catalyst Control Center] Enabling LCD Overdrive will no longer cause mouse cursor to magnify when moved overtop of the "Calibration Preview"
• Firefox now works properly and video no longer drop frames when playing Youtube clips with Adobe Flash Player 10
• [Catalyst Control Center] Newly added custom modes will now appear properly in desktop area tree view
• Confirmation dialogue window will now appear when setting up Eyefinity mode
• 120 Hz is no longer missing from display modes for specific digital displays
• Overscan/underscan issue no longer occurs when setting displays to HDTV modes
• Performance drop no longer observed during some scenes of Resident Evil 5cinematics
• Blocky grass and trees no longer visible in Unigine "Heaven" in OpenGL mode

Download: XP 32-bit | XP 64-bit | Vista 32-bit | Vista 64-bit | 7 32-bit | 7 64-bit

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/37741-amd-pushes-out-first-catalyst-update-of-the-year.html

 

[DragonMaster]

"Firefox now works properly and video no longer drop frames when playing Youtube clips with Adobe Flash Player 10"

Sure...

Catalyst 10.1 + Firefox 3.6 + Flash 10.1 beta 2 = BSOD

Now instead of just freezing Firefox as with the previous Catalyst drivers, Flash 10.1 crashes your whole system.

 

[dividebyzero]

Whoooo hoooo 4% increase in performance in a game launched 29 months ago and is the de facto benchmark of GPU performance- that there is some serious commitment to gaming. Colour me astounded.
Richard Huddy 'n' Terry Makedon you got some 'splaining to do...
Installed this and:
Crysis....still laggy
Anyone else download 10.1 and have it show up in CCC as 9.12 ?

EDIT

Apparently 10.1 is considered by ATI as an "initial release"- things should get better with 10.2 and 10.3 - so all good by March

 

[Puiu]

They still have a lot issues to resolve.
Did anyone else have problems with flash 10.1?

 

[dividebyzero]

They still have a lot issues to resolve.
Did anyone else have problems with flash 10.1?

Everyone by the sounds of it. Check out AMD Game Forums. Was over there trying to find out about the recurring giant cursor problem and the still broken Crysis play.
So far....
Better
AVIVO, Movie playback

Worse/ Same
AntiAliasing is broken in a few games

Driver date is OLD. No update of CCC driver from 9.12 to 10.1
No water on window splashes in DiRT2, when Cat AI is on. It's still not fixed.
Lag when V-sync is off in the trailer outside and while racing.

CoD MW2 the Museum map still sucks. Lag switching from room 1 to 3.
Flash grenade issue still persists

Crysis performance is horrible., binocular's performance hit.
Can confirm that the Harbour/Paradise Lost/Front chapters in Crysis/Warhead are little different. Crossfire users are saying that artifacting is decreased
Crysis : min frame rate reduced by 1-2 fps, maximum higher by 1-2fps, average <1fps diff. (1920x1080 Gamer/Enthusiast settings 4xAA)
No AF in Dragons Age
NFS:Shift still has flickering headlights/tailights
Flash 10.1 broken in Firefox 3.6


Expect some hotfixes. Hopefully they kick in as fast as nVidia's hotfix for the no overclock 192.21.

 

[red1776]

Everyone by the sounds of it.

yup, I am as well, re-installed 9.11

 

[Clrabbit]

I garbed 10.1 about 1hr after it came out, so far I've had no issues playing any type of flash, DiRT2 (Missreable game, I got it to go with my New card to check out DX11, Looks nice, plays like a crappy console game. I'll be sticking to the good old Trackmania I like enjoying my causal gaming.) seemed to run 100% and Crysis seems to run flawlessly for me and my low res 1400x900 LCD

HD 5850 OC MSI on Win7-Ultx64

 

[Burty117]

wow! and people say the nvidia drivers are bad...

 

[Guest]

"Anyone else download 10.1 and have it show up in CCC as 9.12 ?"

Yeah, it happened to me too. Weird...

 

[mailpup]

[Catalyst Control Center] Newly added custom modes will now appear properly in desktop area tree view

Matthew, this sentence is duplicated in the article, one right after the other.

 

[dividebyzero]

wow! and people say the nvidia drivers are bad...

You want to know what's weird?
As soon as nVidia's 196.21 driver was found to break overclocking in some utilities it got plastered and pilloried all over the net. nVidia released a fix 8 days later (196.34) that largely went unreported.

This ATI driver pack was supposed to be the fix for the last few months worth of buggy drivers. Forums, including AMD's own, are filling up with posts on multiple problems including those outlined earlier in this thread. AMD's response is to blame ATI card owners for using Driver Sweeper to prepare for new driver installation ! and to either ignore posters looking for workarounds (which they shouldn't have to implement on this scale- who the hell wants to manually edit the registry to get their card working) or tell people that "Someone forgot to.....but it's insignificant"
Try to find a tech site that is reporting these issues...anywhere.

I own both an nVidia system (GTX280 SLI) and an ATI system (HD 4890). Both have had their share of disappointments in driver releases, but I can honestly say that the last 4+ months of ATI drivers have been the worst run I can remember.

 

[dividebyzero]

I garbed 10.1 about 1hr after it came out, so far I've had no issues playing any type of flash.

You need to get in touch with AMD. Whatever your using seems to have produced a unique situation that hasn't been duplicated anywhere else...not even by ATI's driver team/overworked person

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Matthew, this sentence is duplicated in the article, one right after the other.

Thanks mailpup! I corrected that by adding the appropriate line: "Confirmation dialogue window will now appear when setting up Eyefinity mode".

Sometimes when I copy text from MS Word 2007 via CTRL+C it doesn't register, and so the previous line in the list is duplicated.

 

[Clrabbit]

dividebyzero said:

I garbed 10.1 about 1hr after it came out, so far I've had no issues playing any type of flash.

You need to get in touch with AMD. Whatever your using seems to have produced a unique situation that hasn't been duplicated anywhere else...not even by ATI's driver team/overworked person

I don't know a lot about how Flash and web browsers work, but I use Opera (Been an Opera fan even back when it was a pay-to-use.) witch is fundamentally different then IE, Chrome and Firefox. so that could be it.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Sense Opera users only make up 2.3~% of all the web users its possible there's not enough of us around to be noticed.

The only other web Browser I use is Maxthon-classic, and it makes up for 0.1<% it runs on top of trident engine but really seems to act like a completely different browser, and you can quick switch to the Gecko engine.

 

[dividebyzero]

...but I use Opera (Been an Opera fan even back when it was a pay-to-use.) witch is fundamentally different then IE, Chrome and Firefox. so that could be it.

More than likely. The main reason we are speaking out about (and singled out in this thread) the Firefox issue is because AMD directly stated that they had fixed a flaw in their driver in relation to Firefox 3.6 and Flash 10.1 beta, which is patently untrue

Sense Opera users only make up 2.3~% of all the web users its possible there's not enough of us around to be noticed.

Possibly true but more probably the fact that people who have problems with their driver set are going to be more vociferous than people who are perfectly happy with theirs.

 

[Clrabbit]

sorry, my bad didn't notice the Firefox part.... reasons why you shouldn't skim read when you've been up 24hrs straight.... Or at least not make a comment.

 

[red1776]

You need to get in touch with AMD. Whatever your using seems to have produced a unique situation that hasn't been duplicated anywhere else...not even by ATI's driver team/overworked person

:haha: now that is subtle, and yet biting sardonic wit.

+1 Divide

 

[dividebyzero]

sorry, my bad didn't notice the Firefox part.... reasons why you shouldn't skim read when you've been up 24hrs straight.... Or at least not make a comment.

No worries. Glad to hear that not everyone is affected. I'm assuming that there will be a hotfix on the way, but if not then at least you've provided an alternative workaround and that's the main reason for the forum's existance.

:haha: now that is subtle, and yet biting sardonic wit.

Thanks for the reps. This just grinds my gears. AMD have put out a great series here and as per usual leave the job half completed. Too busy trying to rush the cards out the door.
Richard Huddy can say what he likes about being on the gamers side and portraying ATI as St.George to nVidia's Dragon, bleating on about a committment to excellence etc. Unfortunately that means squat when driver set after driver set breaks as much as it fixes.
It's pretty apparent that anyone with an HD3xxx or HD4xxx series card/s that their performance curve is flatlining and AMD is about ready to jettison the dead weight. This wouldn't be so bad if all their energies were concentrated on the HD5xxx series to make it the product it should be.....but nooooo, they have to play Keystone Cops with this as well.
Having built three systems so far with these cards ( HD 5970, HD 5850 and HD 5770 CF) I can say that most of my email traffic these days revolves around "Why does my screen have stripes through it?", "Why is my system crashing?", "What's up the DX11 ?", "I paid for Crossfire but it don't work"...etc, etc...
The owner of the 5970 (having paid $NZ1380 for the card) is ready to jump ship as soon as Fermi's released without even seeing benchmarks, reviews or pricing !
I'm now advising my customers to either buy a single 5770 or just buy a 9800GT as a placeholder until this mess gets sorted out. I fully expect bugs with new or recently released games but not on games that were released two and a half years ago.
ATI will always have stalwart supporters, as will nVidia, and I think this makes the graphics card producers complacent, doubly so in this case as I get the impression that AMD think the hard yards have been put in with the hardware since they have the only DX11 cards to market and the cards work extremely well in most cases, they can now kick back with a tall drink confident that they have the market sewn up.
I think there are probably a lot more people in the middle ground, affiliated to the best performance for their dollars rather than who produced the card. Keeping these people buying your product is where the battle is won or lost. Mediocre drivers will beat a great card any time. Ask someone who bought an HD4850X2.

 

[Guest]

Yayyyy and after all this time they still can't run 4870 X2's in Crossfire without crashing.
All my games continue to bomb on start up and poor Ol 3d Mark Vantage just can't get through to post without crashing and burning.too,
Maybe 2011 will finally pay dividends on my two thousnad dollar GPU investment....Big Ups AMD!