A little earlier than anticipated, AMD has made available the February 2011 release of its Catalyst graphics driver.
Version 11.2, now available from game.amd.com, bumps the AMD display driver up to release 8.821 and introduces a number of new features, bug fixes and performance enhancements.
Starting with features, Catalyst 11.2 is the first release to introduce official support for Morphological Anti-Aliasing on Radeon HD 5000-series graphics cards, as well as user-configurable tessellation controls on both HD 5000- and HD 6000-series products. The new software will also introduce video quality settings during Blu-ray 3D playback and optimised filtering algorithms that claim to improve performance without hurting image quality.
Over a dozen bug fixes have been issued across the Windows 7 and Windows XP operating systems, but this month's release offers just two game-specific performance improvements. For Radeon HD 5000-series users, Call of Duty: Black Ops performance is said to improve by up to 11 per cent and frame rates in Batman Arkham Asylum should rise by around four per cent.
Like to keep on the cutting edge? Catalyst 11.2 is available for 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows via this link, and you'll find the complete release notes over here. We've included the salient points below.
New Features
- 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 been updated to address 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.
- Tessellation Controls
- Supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series and the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
- New settings give users full control over the Tessellation levels used in applications.
- The default selection “AMD Optimized” setting is intended to set the best level of Tessellation on a per application basis. The “AMD Optimized” setting is designed to help users get the maximum visual benefit of Tessellation, while minimizing the performance impact associated with enabling Tessellation. Currently no applications have been profiled.
- The “Use Application Settings” option gives applications full control over the Tessellation level.
- Users can also manually set the maximum tessellation level used by applications with the slider control
- Morphological Anti-Aliasing support for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
- AMD Catalyst now includes official support for Morphological Anti-Aliasing for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
- Support Video Quality settings during Blu-ray 3D playback
- Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
- Requires Blu-ray 3D player software, 3D supported display and 3D Stereoscopic glasses
- Users can now enable the Video Quality settings within the Catalyst Control Center when playing Blu-ray 3D content
Performance Improvements:
- Call of Duty: Black Ops:
- Performance increases up to 11% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing enabled
- Batman Arkham Asylum:
- Performance increases up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series single configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.
Resolved Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System
- Corruption is no longer randomly observed running the Unigine Heaven benchmark.
- Texture corruption is no longer observed when running the Unigine Heaven benchmark with Super AA enabled in the Catalyst Control Center.
- HAWX no longer intermittently displays corruption when running in DirectX 9 mode.
- Visual corruption is no longer seen when running Lost Planet in DirectX 10 mode.
- Playing a 720p WMV format file no longer randomly causes laggy system performance.
- Video corruption no longer intermittently affects the display when playing a SD format DVD using Windows Media Player.
- Choppy video playback is no longer observed when playing a DVD with interlaced content using WinDVD 10.
- 8x Anti Aliasing is now correctly listed as available with certain 3D applications.
- The AMD Ladybug demo no longer freezes when viewed in camera mode.
- DirectX 9.0 games no longer show intermittent corruption at the bottom of one of the cloned displays.
Resolved Issues for the Windows XP Operating System
- Flickering is no longer randomly observed when applying Video Gamma settings.
- The system no longer hangs intermittently when playing Medal of Honor.
- Civilization V no longer generates a VPU Recovery faulty when Crossfire mode is enabled.
- Warhammer – Dawn of War 2 no longer randomly displays a wireframe when running at High game settings.
