Press Releases

We have just released AMD Catalyst™ 12.6 (WHQL) and AMD Catalyst™ 12.7 Beta drivers: 
http://support.amd.com/us/Pages/AMDSupportHub.aspx



AMD Catalyst 12.6 represents a significant milestone in AMD’s driver development and planning. The list of resolved issues at the end of this email is certainly representative of our continued investment in quality, but it’s symbolic of a deeper systemic change. The truth is that our new driver cadence—releasing drivers as needed—gives us tremendous flexibility to provide releases that are worth upgrading to. By this I mean that you’ll begin to see meatier updates, with a single driver containing a number of fixes and enhancements that could have been deployed over several releases with our old schedule.

Furthermore, our new release program affords us the opportunity to be more innovative and thorough when it comes to exploring performance enhancements—a truth that bears out in this email’s AMD Catalyst 12.7 section. 

It also goes without saying that we’re always looking for further improvement, and the best way to do that is with feedback from experienced users like you. To collect that wisdom, we’ve overhauled the AMD Issue Reporting Form, which you can use to contribute bug reports. We have further assigned a team to sort and investigate the reports coming into this tool, and are ready to handle the feedback you generously provide to us. 



For even more information on Catalyst 12.6 and Catalyst 12.7 Beta, please see our AMD Catalyst blog posting. 

Feature Highlights of AMD Catalyst™ 12.6: AMD Dual Graphics technology
AMD Dual Graphics enhancements – new application profiles for DirectX®9 applications 

Feature Highlights of AMD Catalyst™ 12.6 Linux Driver: New OS Support 

This release of AMD Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems 

• SLED 11 SP2 production support 

• RHEL 5.8 production support 

AMD Catalyst™ 12.7 Beta: More Performance on the World’s Most Popular Games 



For more advanced users, we are also making the AMD Catalyst 12.7 Beta available today. In addition to all of the stability fixes described above, 12.7 also introduces significant performance improvements for multiple generations of AMD Radeon graphics products.
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Catalystbetadriver1.aspx 

Performance highlights of AMD Catalyst™ 12.7 Beta 

•   Up to 25% in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim 

•   Up to 3% in Battlefield 3 

•   Up to 6% in Batman: Arkham City 

•   Up to 3% in Dues Ex: Human Revolution 

•   Up to 6% in Crysis 2 

•   Up to 15% in Total War: Shogun 

•   Up to 8% in Crysis Warhead 

•   Up to 5% in Just Cause 2 

•   Up to 10% in Dirt 3 

Feature highlights of AMD Catalyst™ 12.7 Beta 

Diablo 3: Anti-Aliasing support:
Users can now enable Multi Sample Anti-Aliasing and Super Sample Anti-Aliasing for Diablo 3 through the AMD Catalyst Control Center. 



Video Codec Engine (VCE) support: 
VCE is a hardware mechanism that allows supporting AMD Radeon™ products to dramatically accelerate video encoding in a VCE-enabled application. Starting with Catalyst 12.7 Beta owners of the AMD Radeon™ HD 7900/HD 7800/HD 7700 Series products are now ready take advantage of this feature in compatible applications like vReveal and ArcSoft MediaConverter. 

New AMD Catalyst™ Application Profile is now available

Catalyst 12.7 CAP1: http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/crossfirex-app-profiles.aspx 

•   Diablo 3: Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing and Super Sample Anti-Aliasing can now be enabled for this title through the Catalyst Control Center for single and multi-GPU configurations. This feature is enabled in both AMD Catalyst 12.7 Beta as well as the AMD Catalyst 12.7 CAP1 – either will work.  

•   Call of Duty: World at War: Resolve corruption when enabling Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center on single GPU configurations 

•   Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 – further improvements to CrossFire performance 

•   Myths and Heroes 3: Improves CrossFire performance 

•   XCOM: Enemy Unknown : Improves CrossFire performance 

•   Tom Clancy Ghost Recon Future Soldier: Improves CrossFire performance and resolves flickering seen when running in CrossFire mode 

Resolved issue highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.6 & AMD Catalyst 12.7 Beta 

•   AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800 Tri-CrossFire configurations + Eyefinity no longer results in a BSOD when launching a DirectX application 

•   AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800 Eyefinity/Multiple Display configurations no longer results in a BSOD when using desktop applications 

•   AMD Catalyst 12.6 includes some additional fixes(not found in the AMD Catalyst 12.6 Beta) for the AMD Radeon™ HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 graphics cards for issues related to the GPU hanging when the system goes to sleep. Please ensure that your System BIOS is up to date. Some occurrences of this issue may be related to outdated System BIOS. 

•   Resolves CrossFire scaling issues seen in AMD Catalyst 12.4 with Elder Scrolls: Skyrim CrossFire • AMD Catalyst Control Center – Overdrive page is no longer intermittently missing 

•   AMD Catalyst Control Center – GPU Activity gauge is no longer missing 

•   AMD Radeon HD 7900 CrossFire Configuration – no longer results in system hang after cinematic in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 

•   Heroes and Generals: Blocky corruption in scenes with smoke effects when run in DirectX 11 mode are no longer experienced. 

•   Dirt Showdown: Improves scaling for CrossFire configurations using the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series 

•   HDMI audio is no longer disabled if the connected HDTV is powered Off/On.