AMD Catalyst Software Update Preview

Catalyst Performance
What would a graphics product be without performance, not just over the competitor but also over it’s older generation drivers when looking at comparisons. It would be foolish of course if a manufacturer was to update their drivers without fixing any bugs or increasing performance.

AMD are devoted to fixing bugs but also try to offer as much performance as they can as they update their catalyst suite. Just taking a look at the differences between 9.10 and 10.10 on users with a Radeon HD 5800 series graphics card. They managed to see up to a whopping 68% performance increase in Resident Evil 5. Other performance increases included the graphics intense Metro 2033 with huge 48% performance increase between the drivers. Even some of the newest titles on the market managed to gain a performance increase such as Aliens vs Predator by a satisfying 13%.

Another part of AMD’s Catalyst suite is their Ccatalyst Application Profiles (CAP) which is released every week to give the best compatibility and performance for your setup. Users with multiple graphics card configurations and users taking advantage of AMD’s 3D settings such as Anti-Aliasing will get a lot of benefits from this. This differs slightly as no driver update is required and latest versions include all previous application profiles.

Other performance increases include the DivX Plus codec pack for Radeon HD 6860 and 6900 series graphics cards. This will ultimately give the user and improved video experience as well as improved operation and the ability to perform on the lower end systems by lowering the CPU load, reducing noise and appealing more to entry-level CPUs.

AMD catalyst also supports OpenGL 4.1 giving improved performance when it comes to rendering 2-D and 3-D computer graphics on a cross-platform API.