Legit Reviews

AMD Catalyst 11.1 and AMD Catalyst 11.1a hotfix is now available

New Features:

The new Catalyst Control Center

· The new Catalyst Control Center enables a simplified user experience to help users get the most out of their AMD product

o Easily enable 3D settings to enhance game image quality

o Setup multiple displays to increase productivity

o Adjust power settings to increase battery life

· Supports two unique views – designed for mainstream and advanced users

· User Interface dynamically updates based on available AMD hardware



Support for OpenGL 4.1

· New features introduced in OpenGL 4.1

o Full compatibility with OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs for easier porting between mobile and desktop platforms

o The ability to query and load a binary for shader program objects to save re-compilation time

o The capability to bind programs individually to programmable stages for programming flexibility

o 64-bit floating-point component vertex shader inputs for higher geometric precision

o Multiple viewports for a rendering surface for increased rendering flexibility



Performance highlights:



F1 2010:

· Performance increases up to 12% on AMD Radeon™ HD 6900 and AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.

· Performance increases up to 10% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.



Left 4 Dead 2:

· Performance increases up to 17% on AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 Series single and Crossfire configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.

· Performance increases up to 8% on AMD Radeon™ HD 6900 Series single configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.





Highlights of the Linux AMD Catalyst™ 11.1 release include:





New Features



Support for new Linux operating systems

· This release of AMD Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:

o RHEL 6 support (production)

o RHEL 5.6 support (early look)



Support for OpenGL 4.1

o Full compatibility with OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs for easier porting between mobile and desktop platforms

o The ability to query and load a binary for shader program objects to save re-compilation time

o The capability to bind programs individually to programmable stages for programming flexibility

o 64-bit floating-point component vertex shader inputs for higher geometric precision

o Multiple viewports for a rendering surface for increased rendering flexibility







For more information on AMD Catalyst™ 11.1 (for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues and performance highlights in this release, please see the

AMD Catalyst™ 11.1 release notes.





Also, we’ve posted the AMD Catalyst 11.1a hotfix driver here:

- http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pa ... otfix.aspx



Highlights of the AMD Catalyst 11.1a hotfix include:



· Performance improvements for the AMD Radeon HD 6800 & HD 6900 series in a number of applications

· Catalyst Control Center – New Tessellation controls

· Gives users full control over the tessellation levels used in applications

· Catalyst AI Texture Filtering updates

· The Quality setting has now been improved to match the High Quality setting in all respects but one; it enables an optimization that limits tri-linear anisotropic filtering to areas surrounding texture mipmap level transitions, while doing bilinear anisotropic filtering elsewhere. This optimization offers a way to improve filtering performance without visibly affecting image quality

· The Performance setting has also been updated to address comments about the sharpness of the default Quality setting causing shimmering in certain cases. It now provides a smoother filtering option that eliminates most shimmering while preserving the improved detail provided by anisotropic filtering.

In light of the public release of the Catalyst 11.1a Driver yesterday January 26th, we’d like to highlight that the Hot-Fix 11.1a driver enables our MLAA feature on our ATI Radeon HD 5800 & HD 5900 series graphics cards.

Beginning Catalyst 11.2 we will officially add support for MLAA on 5800/5900 series as well.