AMD Releases Catalyst 15.4 Beta Drivers
by Ryan Smith on April 13, 2015 4:30 PM EST
In a busy day for video card drivers ahead of the Grand Theft Auto V launch, AMD has also released an updated driver set in preparation for release of the game.
Released in beta form, Catalyst 15.4 (display driver ver. 14.502.1014) is AMD’s GTA V launch driver and contains all of their latest optimizations and profiles for the game, including enabling Crossfire support. Along with the GTA improvements, Catalyst 15.4 also brings with it new or updated Crossfire profiles for several other games (including Battlefield Hardline and Metal Gear Solid V: GZ), and bug fixes for Battlefield 4, Battlefield Hardline, and Far Cry 4.
Meanwhile for Windows 10 users, as with NVIDIA’s release today you’ll want to avoid these drivers if you want WDDM 2.0 support. Officially these drivers only support up to Windows 8.1 and are not WDDM 2.0 enabled.
As always, you can grab the drivers for all current desktop, mobile, and integrated AMD GPUs over at AMD’s Catalyst beta download page.
Source: AMD
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Mark_gb - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Other than you, who cares? Drivers came out from both companies to support the new game, and both have a few other new things in them.Stop whining.
JDG1980 - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Am I the only one who thinks it's crazy that every "AAA" game needs special driver hacks to support it? Why can't the developers follow the standard API rules? Will low-level APIs like DX12 finally make this go away?SleepyFE - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Right? What's the point of Direct3D and OpenGL if you have to rewrite the driver every time a new game comes out?MrSpadge - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Think of it as optimizations and adaptions to make it work best, not as hacks. Low level APIs should reduce this if used properly, at the cost of more development. This may not necessarily be more expensive, though, if the tuning is quicker.przemo_li - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
Blame secretive OEMs.They wont share drivers code as floss. So game devs can not optimize their games for drivers.
Also when You have plenty of optimizations done by drivers, drivers will optimize for X or Y, but not both. So sometimes drivers need settings for specific game to activate specific optimization.
With Vulkan lots of that will go away. There will be at least one fully floss implementation...
And those driver optimizations? Gone! Now it will be game engines optimizations and those game devs know about, can reason about, can measure fully.
Also SLI/Crossfire situation is even worse, right now.
ZERO transparency UNLESS OEM release driver specifically for Your game, and You had their engineer on Your team.
Vulkan will help there too! Knowledge&optimizations will be moved to game engines.
(PS. On Linux You already have floss implementations)
Wwhat - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
Yeah sure, one day soon all will be perfect and the roads will be golden and the NSA won't spy on you and the governments won't seek to make life as miserable as possible for their population and there won't be poverty and early beta software being released as being ready for release and nvidia and the like will be all honest and not even attempt to spike the system or cheat , one day soon...jann5s - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Does this driver contain references to the upcoming 3xx series?valinor89 - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Yes, and the news are bad...http://videocardz.com/55289/amd-radeon-rx-300-seri...
KateH - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Looks like the 7870 is destined to be The GPU That Never Dies- it's like NV's G92 all over again, with the 8800GT / 9800GT / GTX150 / GTX250valinor89 - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
Any news on the "phase 2" Omega drivers?