What's New: AMD's Catalyst 10.2 & 10.3 Drivers
by Ryan Smith on February 16, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
10.3: Eyefinity Bezel Correction, Grouping, & Per-Display Controls
Following CrossFire Eyefinity support across the board in Catalyst 10.2, Catalyst 10.3 finally enables per-display color controls - which is particularly handy if you don't have a set of identical displays:
Each display gets color correction, saturation, brightness, contrast and temperature control. To test this I had a triplet of identical Dell 24" displays connected via HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI. An artifact of the premature nature of the drivers was that I couldn't control color temperature on the display connected via HDMI.
Another feature for users with sub-optimal display setups is bezel correction. If you have particularly thick bezels, or displays of differing bezel thickness, Catalyst Control Center now lets you compensate through a fairly easy to use tool.
What you're seeing above are two displays, the bezel divides the yellow triangle. Using the controls on the right you adjust to compensate for bezel thickness. Below is what it looks like on all three displays:
The one key feature that AMD needs to enable support for is real-time aspect ratio correction in games. Unfortunately, despite AMD's efforts, Eyefinity remains something that is poorly supported by many important titles. Yes you'll get full resolution support in most games, but what you'll end up with is a super wide resolution with content stretched to fit it. Currently Widescreen Fixer is one of the best ways to force aspect ratios not properly supported by games.
The easiest way to get around the aspect ratio issues is to simply run in 3x1 portrait mode:
My three 16:10 panels rotated in portrait mode offer a 1.875:1 aspect ratio, not too far off of the 1.6:1 native AR. In landscape mode the aspect ratio is an out of this world 4.8:1 and causes many games to let you play in a very high resolution distorted world:
AMD has apparently done nothing to fix this as recently released titles like Bioshock 2 are simply unplayable in 3x1 Landscape Eyefinity mode. The most important Eyefinity feature we're lacking is developer support at this point. AMD has had a tremendous headstart over NVIDIA in the DirectX 11 GPU generation, to not have this working by now is unacceptable.
The final Eyefinity features supported by Catalyst 10.3 are support for multiple groups and fast switching between Eyefinity modes. Multiple Eyefinity groups could be used to support configurations like one single large surface made up of two monitors and one additional monitor as a desktop extension. This becomes more useful as you get into 4, 5 and 6 display configurations which should be enabled sometime this year.
It's pretty quick to switch between cloned and single large surface display mode (in case you're tired of your start menu being multiple feet to your left but still want to keep the immersive gaming mode). Just a right click and an unnecessarily deep couple of menus and you're there.
You're also supposed to be able to define profiles that include your Eyefinity configuration, to allow you to switch between 3x1 and 1x3 for example if you happen to be some sort of crazyperson and like to reorganize your monitors frequently. Unfortunately neither groups nor profile switching worked reliably for me. The last profile I would create seemed to overwrite the previous one. AMD has until March to finalize the drivers, so I'm guessing these bugs will be gone by then (famous last words).
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bhaberle - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
I found a download for ATI Catalyst 10.2, and the release notes...http://www.geekmontage.com/ati-catalyst-10-2-downl...">http://www.geekmontage.com/ati-catalyst-10-2-downl...
BelardA - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
2D performance under Windows is horrible.Older cards and even something as weak as intels GMA 4500 is better at AERO than a 5870 card.
Stan Zaske - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Good article explaining new features, except it seems clear that being miffed about your communication with AMD over the years clearly shows. This is a MAJOR driver update and Eyefinity is the greatest feature to come along for gamers since Nvidia released Riva 128 with the first onboard 3d hardware. Chill out dudes!jamadaia - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Any news or at least indication that there is possibility of better hybrid crossfire support on IGPs.Am thinking of the possibilities, if the HD4200, forthcoming HD4290 and Fusion IGPs could have more options as to what they can be paired with.
Not expecting the world, but a bit more options like pairing my 785G IGP (HD4200) with something better than a HD3470.
Before anyone says it I know it is not a n ideal thing to crossfire such IGPs, but I like the idea of having a small simple, lower power GPU running 90% of the time and then having a secondary modestly powerful discrete GPU kick in when i occasionally play games the rest of the 10% of time.
And with the on board IGP clocked up, a free say even a modest 10% - %20 boost to the discrete GPU is surely not a bad thing?
iamezza - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
When the performance delta between the onboard and discrete graphics becomes too large, it becomes near impossible to gain any benefit from the extra 10-20% of theoretical performance boost the IGP could provide. In most instances performance will actually go down.legoman666 - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Hook us up with a link to the 10.3 beta, Jared. ;) They have the two features I want most: bezel management and per monitor color profiles in eyefinity.AznBoi36 - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Now we just need support for mixed monitor setups.I would love to flank my two DELL 2007FPs in portrait mode with my DELL 3007WFP-HC centering them.
BernardP - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Despite ATI's current lead in graphics card, I can't buy their product because ATI drivers don't allow creation and scaling of custom resolutions. With NVidia drivers, I can instantly create and scale any custom resolution. With ATI, I am stuck with default resolutions on my monitor's .INF file, or I can try to fiddle with Powerstrip.I'm currently running my 24-inch widescreen @ 1536x960: much easier on the eyes. Try to get this resolution with an ATI card.
Please ATI, give me this feature, and I will switch on my next upgrade.
leexgx - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
set your monitor to 1920x1080 (or what ever your default monitor settings are) use the DPI option to 125% or 150% (125% is more then enough for short sited people)BernardP - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
Wait until you get to be my age and start squinting at microscopic 1920x1200 icons and fonts ;-)Playing with DPI is only a partial fix and doesn't work with all apps, or works only partailly in some apps.
With Nvidia drivers, lower-than-native-resolution scaling is excellent and results are not blurry. No need to even enable Clear Type.
My point is that ATI doesn't offer this feature.