Legit Reviews

AMD today released this month's timely release of its Catalyst software suite, a unified software package that installs the latest drivers for AMD Radeon graphics processors, AMD HDMI audio device, 7-series and 8-series chipsets, and related system software. This particular release has been touted by its makers within the community to provide significant performance improvements, some of which have been demonstrated by a "preview" version of Catalyst 11.4 released last month. A partial list of those games can be found here. The rest of the change log is awaited, and you will be updated once we have it. - News Source

Highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 11.4 Windows release include:

Feature highlights

Enhancements to the AMD VISION Engine Control Center / AMD Catalyst Control Center

· New task based Display Management controls

o Simplifies the configuration of displays and display settings

· New Eyefinity setup group

o Setting up an Eyefinity group has never been easier

· AMD Catalyst update notification (found within the Information Center)

o This feature notifies users that new AMD Catalyst software packages are available

GPU Compute enhancements:

The OpenCL runtime (included in AMD Catalyst 11.4) includes performance enhancements supporting zero-copy on APUs and increased performance for PCIe transfers between a CPU and discrete GPU.

Performance highlights

The AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series and AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series of products will see the following performance gains:
Call of Duty Black Ops – gains of up to 15% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single GPU configurations
Battleforge – gains of up to 15% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single and multiple GPU configurations
Batman Arkham Asylum – gains of up to 20% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single and multiple GPU configurations
Aliens vs. Predator – gains of up to 8% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single and multiple GPU configurations
Civilization 5 – gains of up to 15% on single and multiple GPU configurations
Far Cry 2 – gains of up to 6% on single and multiple GPU configurations
Just Cause 2 – gains of up to 9% on single and multiple GPU configurations
Lost Planet 2 – gains of up to 10% on single and multiple GPU configurations



Resolved issue highlights

The GPU no longer shows high GPU usage after when running Firefox 4 with hardware acceleration enabled.
Bioshock no longer displays random tearing and screen corruption with Vsync and MLAA enabled.
Water textures no longer flicker in Two Worlds II in Crossfire mode.
Bulletstorm lightshafts no longer appear broken when running on a HD 6970 series product.
Bulletstorm no longer displays random texture corruption when running in Crossfire mode.
FI 2010 no longer slows down intermittently when in Crossfire mode.
PowerDVD no longer crashes if Crossfire is enabled / disabled during playback of a BD title.
Running the Heaven benchmark no longer displays graphics corruption during DirectX 11 tests.



Highlights of the Linux AMD Catalyst™ 11.4 release include:

Feature Highlights

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

Ubuntu 11.04 support (early look)
SLED/SLES 10 SP4 support (early look)
RHEL 5.6 support (production)