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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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.