AMD to distribute drivers over Steam, Catalyst 10.9 released

[Matthew DeCarlo]

Updating your Radeon drivers just got easier. AMD has partnered up with Valve to deliver Catalyst graphics drivers over Steam. ATI GPU updates can now be detected and installed directly from within Steam -- a convenience that will affect plenty of users. Valve reports that a whopping 87% of gamers with DirectX 11 cards on Steam are using an ATI product.

Not coincidentally, a new driver has been released today. Catalyst 10.9 offers performance improvements for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena for certain 4000 and 5000-series cards. There are also new or updated Catalyst profiles for Aliens vs. Predator, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, F1 2010, and Kane & Lynch 2.

There are nearly a dozen highlighted bug fixes in the release notes (PDF), spanning Windows XP through Windows 7, and Catalyst 10.9 brings official support for hardware acceleration in the Internet Explorer 9 beta (which is now available). Look under the "Steam" menu in the top left of the Steam client for an option to update your video drivers, or just download them below:

Desktop: Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/40291-amd-to-distribute-drivers-over-steam-catalyst-109-released.html

 

[Guest]

This works awesome. Just updated my 5870 to the 10.9's. Looks like a pretty decent release too.

Thanks AMD/Valve!

 

[Cueto_99]

Nice way to distribute updates! Keep it up AMD/Valve!

 

[DokkRokken]

This will be great for people who game, but are not hardware enthusiasts. A lot of people run their cards using old drivers and likely aren't aware that they can update them.

 

[Tekkaraiden]

And this is why I love Steam.

 

[Relic]

@Dokk Yup, this is definitely nice for those who have pre-built machines and never update especially those who are intimidated by it. Just ran the update myself to check it out and its extremely easy and works great.

 

[Phraun]

Wow that's impressive... That's a pretty big deal for those who are intimidated by driver updates. Nice work all around on this one.

 

[Chazz]

I also just tested out the instal process. It was flawless and didn't require a reboot. Typically I do a clean install and clean the old ones with driver sweep/ ccleaner so I'll continue to update drivers that way. This is pretty nifty for users who rarely ever update.

 

[Guest]

Great idea and kudos for the effort. I already found a concern though. Steam forces install of games onto the same drive that Steam is loaded on. When I added a "boot" SSD I had to delete all of my Steam files then reinstall the GUI and games on "D". When I just tried to complete the update, sure enough it wanted to install the drivers on "D" when my exisiting are on "C". I don't see any way to force install on the proper drive.

This isn't meant as a complaint. Just pointing out an issue and and can only imagine the problems I might have if I had two sets of drivers installed at the same time. Maybe I need some more information myself on using Steam, but otherwise this could lead to some serious problems for a few users...

(If I am an ***** regarding Steam, it is because I'm just getting over the debacle of installing HL2 when only dial-up was available in my area. Yeah, I know that was like 20 years ago or something. Have bought a few games lately though and am enjoying the value and convenience of the service.)

Still can't remember my login... Ikenlob

 

[Arris]

Hi Ikenlob, what you are saying is that their installer just puts the drivers on the system drive instead of where the previous drivers were installed? If so I'll be avoiding this on my home desktop as Vista(yes, yuk, but why upgrade it when 90% of the time it only gets used for some games) has gradually eaten up most of the free space on the system partition, so in the past I've installed the drivers on another.

Nice concept though, good thinking AMD/Valve.

 

[Guest]

@Ikenlob:
Is it possible that the files are just being unpacked to your Steam install drive, but they are actually being installed to the correct location? I know when manually updating drivers, that typically the files are unpacked to some directory somewhere, but they are then installed into the relevant Windows directories. If I had to guess, this is what is happening.

If you are willing to take a risk, move the directory from your steam folder to someplace else, and then reboot. If your display remains unchanged with no errors, this is indeed what is happening. If moving the files causes bad things to happen (aka degraded or no windows video), reboot into safe mode, then move the directory back.

With regards to this feature of Steam, this is very slick. I love Valve, and I more and more love AMD/ATI lately (seems now that Hector is gone as the CEO of AMD, things are really getting better...go Dirk!)

 

[Zilliak]

I updated mine and it blue screened and forced me to restore. Lmao

 

[seronx]

It works with Nvidia as well...

It just shoots you to the website tho lol

 

[treeski]

Very cool idea, but I gave it a go on my desktop, and the installation process stopped responding. I don't know if that actually has anything to do with Steam though. I downloaded the driver update directly through the AMD website, installed again, and there were no issues.

 

[Guest]

Thanks to those responding to my concern. I did consider it might install the drivers into the correct directory when all was said and done, but was unwilling to risk a try. I've also always subscribed to the recommendation of un-installing current drivers before installing new ones. I guess it would have made me more confident if it had given a few indications of how things would proceed. Perhaps one or two dialog boxes making it clear that A: "proceeding with installation will result in current drivers being removed followed by installation of new drivers.", then B: "the drive for your current drivers does not match the drive for your Steam account. Install new drivers in the same location as the current (YES/ NO).

Something along those lines would have made me feel more confident. I assumed when reading this article, that either the process was automated to include removal of older drivers or AMD had fixed/ removed concerns with installing over top. When I checked AMD's driver page though, it is still a published recommendation to remove existing drivers first.

Again, I appreciate the effort by AMD and Valve. Hopefully I am being needlesly paranoid...

ikenlob