AMD Catalyst 15.8 Beta Driver Released

AMD has released the Catalyst 15.8 driver which includes a number of hotfixes and enhanced performance in Batman: Arkham Knight and Ashes of the Singularity. Here is the full list of optimizations:

Highlights of AMD Catalyst™ 15.8 Beta Windows Driver

• This driver provides support for the Oculus 0.7 SDK on Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. More information on the Oculus 0.7 SDK can be found at the following link on the Oculus Developer site:

Performance Optimizations

• Batman™: Arkham Knight – Performance and quality/stability updates
• Ashes of the Singularity – Performance optimizations for DirectX® 12

Resolved Issues:

• [424009] Adobe® Lightroom may crash if GPU rendering is enabled
• [423336] Mouse cursor coordinates may be swapped on some 3×1 Eyefinity configurations
• [421110] The Witcher® 3: Wild Hunt – Corruption may be observed when AA is enabled in AMD CrossFire™ mode
• [424127] The Firefox browser may crash while opening multiple tabs (2 or more)
• [425168] Anti Aliasing settings are not retained after Applying in the AMD Catalyst™ Control Center
• [425156] System hangs when launching Call of Duty® – Modern Warfare 3 or Diablo™ III
• [424776] Metal Gear Solid® : Ground Zero may crash when launched
• [425421] Call Of Duty®: Black Ops III – texture corruption observed when launched in DirectX® 11 mode
• [425452] Sword Coast Legends – FRTC settings are not activated in the game
• [411945] Project CARS may experience corruption when AA is set to D2SM
• [425382] A green screen may be observed on some “Llano”/”Ontario” APU’s when playing video under Windows 10
• [424330] Watch Dogs™ may experience flickering / corruption after changing game resolution
• [425440] AMD HDMI® Audio is disabled after driver installation
• [423013] F1 2015™ may experience flickering during gameplay or in game benchmarking
• [422551] Call of Duty® – Advanced Warfare may freeze randomly when run in Quad CrossFire mode
• [424168] Text corruption observed when using Windows 10 Mapp application
• [424222] System may hang when installing the driver on a Windows 10 system with 2 or more GPUs
• [424710] “Device being used by another application” error is displayed when attempting audio playback on Windows 7 systems

Known Issues:

• [423924] Unable to create an Eyefinity SLS if one of the displays is a MST display device
• [423759] Unable to apply Fill mode in Eyefinity if 2560×1600 and 2560×1440 resolutions are used together
• [425484] DiRT Rally™ crashes during gameplay and benchmarking when launched in DirectX 11® mode on some BENQ 144HZ Freesync monitors
• [425496] Mad Max – Color corruption is observed when Alt+Ctrl+Del is pressed followed by the Escape key
• [422806] Battlefield™ Hardline crashes on pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del while running in AMD Mantle mode
• [422674] Corruption may occur in DiRT Rally™ with CMAA enabled with Portrait SLS and AMD CrossFire™ mode enabled
• [425417] Windows 10 driver installation may halt on some systems with an AMD 990FX chipset and AMD CrossFire™ enabled
  • As a temporary workaround, please uninstall the existing driver before installing the AMD Catalyst™ 15.8 Beta driver
• [425432] Some BENQ 144hz Freesync monitors may lose the signal while uninstalling the driver
• [425659] Assassin’s Creed® Unity may experience minor frame stutter when AMD CrossFire™ mode is enabled

Please note, the driver is still in a Beta stage meaning there could be instability issues, or undocumented bugs. Nevertheless, it’s promising to see updates for Batman: Arkham Knight which is not only a terrible PC port, but also prone to crashing on AMD graphics cards. On another note, it will be interesting to see the effect optimizations will have in the Ashes of the Singularity DirectX 12 patch. Will the trend of significant gains on AMD cards continue?

Do you download Beta drivers or patiently wait for the final release?