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
10.2: Crossfire Profiles, DisplayPort Audio, & Crossfire Rearchitecture
The last big feature coming with the 10.2 drivers is a change to how AMD profiles games for Crossfire support. Currently the profiles are integrated in to AMD’s drivers, meaning AMD has to produce a complete hotfix driver whenever they need to publish what’s otherwise a minor profile update to enable Crossfire support for a game. This is clumsy for the user (it’s 110MB+), a source of extra work for AMD, and a nuisance for all parties since it means it can take quite some time before Crossfire support gets enabled on a game.
For 10.2, AMD is finally stepping up to the plate and separating the Crossfire profiles from the drivers. The profiles are now stored in a separate encrypted file (atiapfxx.blb) that can easily be updated whenever AMD needs to publish a new set of profiles. AMD will now be able to offer a small executable download that will install the latest profile set, and can update that out-of-band without interfering with driver releases and development.
For NVIDIA users, this is nothing new. NVIDIA has offered the same feature for quite some time, so this brings AMD up to parity with NVIDIA on the matter. The recently released Mass Effect 2 is a great example of this: NVIDIA was able to publish a half-megabyte profile update, while AMD had to publish a 112MB Catalyst hotfix. With profile support, AMD will now be able to publish small (and potentially frequent) profile updates just like NVIDIA has been doing.
The files in a Catalyst profile update
There is still going to be one difference between the two companies however, and that’s letting end-users meddle with profiles. NVIDIA has allowed end-users to write and edit profiles for games (including through the use of tools like nHancer) while AMD has not. This will not be changing – AMD users will still not be able to write their own profiles.
When we asked Terry about this at CES, he said that AMD’s position is that they believe users are better off with professionally created and validated profiles, rather than enthusiast created profiles that may end up having problems. We don’t disagree with the logic of this statement, but as enthusiasts we have never been above getting our hands dirty and/or creating problems in the process of solving them (it’s half the fun!). AMD absolutely needs to publish profiles for games, but we still want to see AMD relinquish some of their control of game profiles so that enthusiasts have the ability to play with them if they desire.
To that end, we did some digging and at least in the 10.3 driver set being sampled to us, AMD includes a utility called atiapfxx that can read and write the encrypted files that store profiles. However in spite of its proclaimed ability to decrypt AMD’s profiles, we have been unable to successfully do so as the tool keeps crashing. Furthermore AMD declined to provide us with any kind of sample of what an unencrypted profile (which would be in XML form) would look like, so we don’t even know quite what’s in a profile. Finally, it looks like AMD is signing the profiles with a key (not included) judging from the command-line options in the utility. So in spite of having moved profiles out of the drivers, it doesn’t look like enthusiasts are any closer to getting to write profiles for AMD’s drivers.
Moving on, we have the addition of DisplayPort Audio to AMD’s drivers. This is another 10.2 feature that originally showed up in the 9.12 hotfix drivers, so its inclusion here should come as no surprise. The DisplayPort standard allows for audio to be transmitted along-side the video stream, and while AMD’s hardware has supported it, it’s only finally being enabled in the drivers. Right now it’s a forward-looking feature – since DisplayPort isn’t meant to replace HDMI for TV connections, it’s only used by a few monitors that have some kind of integrated audio capabilities such as built-in speakers or a built-in headphone jack, such as Dell’s U2410.
Finally, AMD has been doing some work to rearchitect how Crossfire works at the driver level, and those changes are in the 10.2 drivers. AMD has moved some Crossfire code from the 3D driver to a separate driver component as a forward-looking gesture. By doing this, AMD is getting the Catalyst drivers ready for future products such as Llano, AMD’s first CPU/GPU Fuzion product. The ultimate purpose is going to be to allow them to better combine IGP and discrete GPUs, much like Hybrid Crossfire did on AMD’s earlier products but with a greater tolerance for feature differences. Bear in particular mind that AMD’s next IGP (before Fuzion) will be DX10.1 based, while AMD’s current GPUs are DX11 based.
Llano: The reason for the Crossfire rearchitecture
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anactoraaron - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
yeah "fast and versitile control panel" that doesn't include any overclocking option. And why is that again? Oh yeah, Nvidia cards these days (provided you acutally are getting "new" technology and not a rebrand) run HOT. And looking at load temps/power usage from any other article on this fine website will show proof of that. OC with them with no water cool and you are asking for trouble. And don't even get me started with all of the issues with nTune... I lost count of all the times nTune crashed my pc with my 8800...leexgx - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
stop useing caps (please press report post to remove users post like this)bim27142 - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
man, chill... if you don't want CCC, then just download the drive only and then get yourself some other softwares (say ATI Tray Tools perhaps?)cheinonen - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
I'm just glad they will finally have monthly drivers for my wife's laptop so I'm not at the mercy of HP deciding they want to support it. Her machine can't do full screen Flash with the CPU only, and HP has refused to release an updated driver with Flash 10.1 acceleration support, even though they could, so hopefully by next month she'll be watching Hulu on her laptop full screen.RaynorWolfcastle - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
While all this is great, I think ATI should instead focus on fixing the grey screen bug that shows up on Win7 x64. My 5770 is all but unusable because it crashes every 30 mins while I'm browsing the web. Unfortunately, this issue is not a bad card but a widespread issue with the current drivers that affects several brands and models. Google "grey screen of death" to see what I mean.So AMD, how about we start with the basics, and get your cards to work without crashing instead of these new features?
heymrdj - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Now if only drivers would get rid of this random problem..FXi - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
If AMD manages to get mobile drivers out this could be doom for Nvidia in the mobile space.DX11 (judging by Nvidia's silence on the mobile DX11 topic) is apparently not within Nvidia's capability this year. It's not even on the roadmaps. Fermi is big and hot, not mobile. Now mind you, AMD has been "talking" mobile drivers for a year and has yet to deliver, so there is that weakness to this. But if AMD is DX11, and the only mobile DX11 solution, with drivers on top of that, Nvidia can wave bye bye to all their mid to high end GPU solutions for laptops.
To top it off AMD's mobile solutions are all 40nm, so they are lower power than Nvidia's high end mobile solutions.
If Nvidia has a flag to wave, they had better wave it soon. The DX11 mobile parts are here. Drivers come in 30 days. And the marketshare shift comes after that. That spells doom and gloom for Nvidia's sales.
Ramon Zarat - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Very nice article.Despite the fact that I recognize ATI tremendous progression on the driver front in recent years, in many respects, they are unfortunately still behind Nvidia.
On the other hand, they definitively have the current hardware market lead and momentum. And to be honest, their drivers have not been this close to Nvidia, ever. So close, but still so far at he same time...
To really take the longterm control of the GPU market, they must pull all the stops and take the lead from Nvidia within the next 10 months. Once you have missed this windows of opportunity, it's too late. ATI have proven they can execute flawlessly on the hardware level with the impressive roll-out of the 5000 series. Now they need to do the same of the software side of the equation.
In the mid-term, GPGPU, or more to the point OpenCL, will become much more than just the niche market CUDA is right now, more or less confined to the role of marking bragging rights and branding technological statement. It will soon become, if not already the case, a major purchasing decision factor.
Just like Adobe flash, despite currently being based on Microsoft proprietary DXVA2, more and more apps will become GPGPU aware. Logically, sooner than later, every applications will take advantage of it simply because of the decisive market edge it will provide. Anything that don't will instantly become obsolete. That mean all and every applications requiring more juice than Microsoft calculator or Solitaire...
2011 is shaping up to be the Opencl year and as such, a significant turning point in the overall computing balance of power. ATI can't afford to miss that boat and must in fact imperatively be ahead of that game. That's crucial for them as for the AMD's branch fusion platform. Integration and convergence will be more prevalent than ever.
There are much more things to do than just OpenCl, but in my opinion, that should be priority number one. The fact they are so behind in that department is obvious if you compare Stream with Cuda market penetration, drivers maturity, OpenCL SDK and their overall strategy. Add to this the need to be ahead 10 months from now means only one thing: MAJOR R&D spending and hire A LOT of software engineers!
Anything less would qualify as a monumental missed opportunity as such fundamental transitive market vectors (GPGPU and OpenCL) are a very rare occurrence in the computing technological evolution cycle. It's not everyday that a technology goes from a totally exclusive vertical gaming centric focus to a complete horizontal, general purpose capable device delivering, in a variety of applications, 30 to 100% processing speed acceleration, and in some situations a lot more than that compare to CPU alone!
In fact, I can't even remember anything close the near-paradigm of the current situation since the inception of electronic digital computing device with the introduction, in 1937, of the Atanasoff–Berry computer. In all that time, we have witnessed many incredible innovations and actual real paradigms shift, but as far as I know, nothing like this transmutation of an existing technology. It's like the GPU went from the confine of its larva state to finally hatch and achieve its full GPGPU potential! OpenCL is the mean to open that floodgate. That's why it's so important ATI make this happen, fast.
Ramon
R3MF - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
I want it AMD, and it want it installed by default in the catalyst driver.tntomek - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
The 5000 series mobile GPU adoption is seriously hurting. Dell has nothing, HP only has the envy which is great if only if were available in Canada/UK for less than $2199And what really is the point of i5 if I can't switch and run on Intel graphics when I'm working in Word, doesn't have to be pretty and automatic just give me the option if even via reboot or logout. No need for slow notebook and sweaty palms in 2010.