AMD Releases Catalyst 13.5 Beta And 13.4 WHQL Drivers

AMD have been a bit slow to get some new official WHQL drivers to market, in fact as far as I can remember the last WHQL-signed drivers from AMD were the version 13.1 which arrived in early January. That means over three months have elapsed since we’ve seen a new WHQL-signed release. That said AMD had been releasing 13.2 and 13.3 beta drivers throughout this 3 month period.

However, starting off with the 13.4 WHQL drivers which you can see above, it is clear they provide some welcome and sizeable performance gains of 5 to 15% in various games over the latest 13.1 WHQL release. A 10% increase in Borderlands 2 performance at 1600p is a pretty nice boost to anyone playing that game on an AMD 7900 series graphics card. The key things to note about the 13.4 WHQL release are:

• Recommended for the AMD Radeon HD 7990 graphics processor
• Extensive optimizations for Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon
• Up to 6% improved performance in Tomb Raider
• Up to 6% improved performance in BioShock Infinite
• Up to 5% improved performance in Sid Meier’s Civilization V
• Up to 4% improved performance in Far Cry 3
• Up to 18% improved performance in Borderlands 2 with FXAA
• Resolves TressFX Hair corruption seen in Tomb Raider on the AMD Radeon HD 7790 GPU

For those enthusiasts that like to have the absolute latest drivers then AMD has chucked out the 13.5 beta for you to feast on. From my personal experience the AMD beta drivers are just as stable as WHQL signed drivers so I would personally recommend these. As you can see Borderlands 2 stands out as the game seeing the most improvements with just over 15% extra performance at 1080p.

• Full stack of performance optimizations for Crysis 3, bringing the many enhancements we’ve developed for our beta drivers into the certified driver tree.
• Full stack of performance optimizations for BioShock Infinite, bringing the many enhancements we’ve developed for our beta drivers into the certified driver tree.
• Full stack of performance optimizations for Tomb Raider, bringing the many enhancements we’ve developed for our beta drivers into the certified driver tree.
• Windows Hardware Certification for AMD Radeon HD 7990 and HD 7790 GPUs
• Up to 5% improved  performance in Batman: Arkham City
• Up to 10% improved performance in Borderlands 2
• Up to 14% improved performance in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars with MSAA
• Up to 11% improved performance for Hitman Absolution
• Up to 11% improved performance in Return to Castle Wolfenstein MP
• Up to 5% improved performance in Sid Meier’s Civilization V
• Performance optimizations for the 2013 release of SimCity
• Resolves rare image corruption seen in Tomb Raider with TressFX Hair enabled
• Implements the frame latency fixes for Tomb Raider and Hitman Absolution™ that were tested in our beta drivers
• Implements the DirectX 9.0c texture flickering fixes developed and tested in our beta drivers
• Adds support for multiple OpenGL 4.3 extensions

For more details on the specifics of these driver releases please see the AMD blog. To get the latest AMD 13.4 WHQL certified drivers then please visit the AMD website here, or to get the latest AMD 13.5 Beta drivers then please visit the download page here.