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What's New: AMD's Catalyst 10.2 & 10.3 Drivers

 by Ryan Smith on February 16, 2010 12:00 AM EST
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75 Comments

While we were at CES, AMD briefed us about several things. We’ve already had a chance to tell you about the Redwood chip behind the Radeon HD 5670 and 5570, and the Cedar chip behind the Radeon HD 5450. There was one last thing we haven’t had a chance to tell you about yet, and that’s drivers. Along-side our briefings about AMD’s new cards, they spent some time discussing what would be happening with the Catalyst 10.2 and Catalyst 10.3 drivers.

The Catalyst 10.2 drivers come out today, while the Catalyst 10.3 drivers will be next month’s release. We’ll just jump right in to the heart of things and list what’s coming with each release:

Catalyst 10.2

  1. Crossfire profile – Per-game Crossfire profiles are being moved out of the drivers, so that AMD can distribute out-of-band profile updates.
  2. CrossfireX rearchitecture - Certain parts of AMD’s multi-GPU code has been moved from the 3D driver to another driver component; this segmentation is largely to benefit Fuzion integrated CPU/GPUs later this year.
  3. Ultra Low Power State – This feature for lower-idling on Crossfire slave cards has been in the entire 5000 series. However it’s only being enabled across the board starting with this release.
  4. Crossfire Eyefinity – Eyefinity now works with all Crossfire configurations, not just on the 5970..
  5. DisplayPort Audio – The 5000 series is now capable of outputting audio over the DisplayPort in accordance with the DisplayPort standard.

Catalyst 10.3

  1. Catalyst Mobility – AMD will once again be releasing Catalyst drivers for most Mobility GPUs.
  2. Eyefinity Bezel Correction – Eyefinity setups can finally be adjusted to compensate for the space occupied by monitor bezels.
  3. Eyefinity Per Display Controls – Per display color correction, particularly useful for mismatched monitors.  
  4. Eyefinity Multiple Groups
  5. Eyefinity Display Configuration Switching
  6. 3D Stereo driver hooks – AMD is implementing some low-level hooks to help 3rd-party 3D displays work with Radeon cards.

For today’s 10.2 release, much of what AMD is enabling has already snuck out in earlier driver releases in some form or another. December’s 9.12 Hotfix enabled Crossfire Eyefinity, DisplayPort Audio, and Ultra Low Power State, so it’s best to think of the 10.2 driver as the shipping version of what we saw with the 9.12 hotfix.

10.3 on the other hand has not been released in a hotfix form, so everything here is brand-new.

10.2: Ultra Low Power State Confusion & Crossfire Eyefinity
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  • ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link

    Whether due to the popularity of consoles or Windows XP, in actuality, the majority of new AAA games still support DX9.0c cards like the X1000 series or the nVidia 6000 and 7000 series. Recent big name games include Aliens vs. Predator, Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 2, Dirt 2, Modern Warfare 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Left 4 Dead 2, Dragon Age Origins, and Wolfenstein. Upcoming major titles like Bad Company 2, Battlefield 1943, Assasin's Creed 2, Supreme Commander 2, and Napolean: Total War also support DX9.0c graphics cards.

    The number of major new games that support DX9.0c GPUs are probably higher than those that require DX10 generation GPUs only (for performance rather than requring DX10). Certainly, if you have a higher-end last gen DX9.0c GPU like a X1900 series there'll be new AAA games for you for the forseeable future, even if the driver support is sketchy. And games like Aliens vs. Predator and the new Battlefield games use new engines which won't have existing driver optimizations. For whatever reason, developers seem to want to continue to support DX9.0c generation GPUs, while it may be legacy driver support that give them pause, which of course may be what ATI wants.

  • Exodite - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link

    I'll reiterate what I've been saying since I got my Radeon 4870 way back in 2008, the lack of automatic profiling support in AMD's drivers were the main drawback when switching over from my GeForce 7950GT.

    It still is.

    Sure, there are third party tools that may or may not provide the same functionality but since there must be some support for automatic profiling built-in already for Catalyst AI and CrossFireX profiles to work I find it extremely annoying that I'm unable to tie my CCC profiles into specific titles.

    Heck, just the ability to run automatically one OverDrive profile for 2D and one for 3D would be a major step in the right direction.

    Nice article though, I'll try out the 10.2s later today then and hopefully it'll fix the issues I'm having with the ATI HDMI Sound device getting disconnected every time I resume from sleep that I've been having with the 10.1s.

  • JaLooNz - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link

    Hopefully this will mean better drivers for my T400's HD3470, assuming that it works with switchable graphics. Better still if they can somehow get software switching in before nVidia releases Optimus.

  • Mr Perfect - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link

    Yeah, it's about time they started doing this. Nvidia made universal notebook drivers available almost a year ago, which just about makes them the default video card choice for gameing notebooks.

  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link

    Optimus is already available in several notebooks (ASUS UL50Vf and N61J for example), but I'd be curious to hear if the mobile drivers work with your switchable graphics T400 or not. If you can find the pre-release and test, I'd love to hear the result. :-)

  • cactusdog - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link

    Good work AMD. My 5870 is an awesome card but i might look at crossfire if these drivers live up to expectations.

  • ksherman - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link

    Is a much-needed feature! With Windows's limitation to one monitor color profile per video card, makes it tough to have color-accurate monitors in multi-screen environments. Something OS X handles beautifully. Thanks AMD!

  • samspqr - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link

    +1

  • Iketh - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link

    I'm just happy the bugs fixed in 9.12 are finally added to the 10 series... damn the oversized mouse cursor!!

  • blyndy - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link

    "all the issues we were seeing with the new Radeon 5000 series cards in HTPC use"

    all?

    Is it a laundry-list of issues?
    or is it a few non-show-stopper issues?
    I've only heard of a minor bug or two.

    ULPS and interlacing performance on low-end cards are nit-picking.
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