ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 Driver – Everything you want to know and why you should care
Game Optimizations: ATI CatalystTM 9.8 Driver
Our test system configuration is:
| AMD Phenom II 940 (3.0GHz) processor |
| Asus M3A79-T(790) motherboard |
| 4GB DDR2-800 5-5-5-18 memory |
| Windows VISTA Ultimate SP1 64bit |
This month we are seeing a massive performance increase with a whole host of games as compared to the ATI Catalyst 9.7 driver. Detailed release notes are available for most of the game optimizations; here are the highlights:
- Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance improves of up to 50% with the largest gains in configurations using ATI CrossFireXTM technology.
- Company of Heroes DirectX 10 performance improves of up to 77%.
- Crysis DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 10% and quad mode performance improves of up to 34%.
- Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 7% and quad mode performance improves of up to 69%.
- Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 50% and quad mode performance improves of up to 88%.
- Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 40% and with quad mode performance improving of up to 60%.
- UnigineTropics OpenGL performance improvements of up to 20%.
- UnigineTropics DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in quad mode improvements of up to 20%.
- World in Conflict DirectX 10 performance improvements of up to by 10%.
Marketing sound bite: ATI Catalyst 9.8 – Open GLTM 3.1 Support
It’s fitting that last weekend AMD was in attendance at Quakecon 2009 in Dallas,Texas where the world’s most prolific OpenGLsupporters gathered for 4 days of ‘peace, love and rockets,’ that we are announcing support for OpenGL 3.1 and the following details:
This release of the ATI Catalyst driver provides OpenGL 3.1 extension support. The following is a list of OpenGL 3.1 features and extensions added in ATI Catalyst 9.8:
- Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 and 1.40.
- Instanced rendering with a per-instance counter accessible to vertex shaders (GL ARB draw instanced).
- Data copying between buffer objects (GL EXT copy buffer).
- Primitive restart (NV primitive restart). Because client enable/disable no longer exists in OpenGL 3.1, the PRIMITIVE RESTART state has become server state, unlike the Nvidia extension where it is client state. As a result, the numeric values assigned to PRIMITIVE RESTART and PRIMITIVE RESTART INDEX differ from the NV versions of those tokens.
- At least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders, in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders.
- Texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object).
- Rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle).
- Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object).
- SNORM texture component formats.
And last but surely not least, my favorite community: ATI CatalystTM 9.8 driver for Linux!
Support for new Linux operating systems
This release of ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:
- RHEL 4.8 production support
- Ubuntu 9.04 production support
ATI CatalystTM Control Center – Linux Edition support for RandR 1.2
This release of the ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces ATI Catalyst Control Center – Linux Edition support for the RandR 1.2 extension API. The following new features are now available in the ATI Catalyst Control Center – Linux Edition Display Manager:
- Display rotation
- Multiple display arrangement and desktop sizing
To download the full release notes here.
Please report all technical support issues here.
See you next month!
Cheers!
Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton
Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Ian when can we get per apps 3d settings
i cant get it to work on fedora 11 :/ kernel 2.6.29
@Y@hOO,
! I’ve upgraded to 2.6.30.5, 2.6.30.4, and still nothing! With 2.6.30.5, the X server starts but after opening a few windows the whole system freezes (everything, mouse pointer, keyboard, power button). The temperature is normal (below 48C – I have a HD3450). With “radeon” and “radeonhd” drivers the system is stable but there are some anoying artifacts on 2D, and no “real” 3D support… I really hoped that 9.8 fglrx will solve these problems but it seems not! I guess I’ll switch back to nvidia as their linux driver support seems better.
me neither – on 2.6.29 the X server crashes (i’ve flooded kernel ooops with crash-dumps last night – Fedora auto-sends them
It’s great to see AMD getting quite a bit of good press lately with OpenCL on x86, attendance at Quakecon, DX11 GPU demo, and now the release of Catalyst 9.8 with OpenGL 3.1 support and many optimizations.
With AMD being a big supporter of Wolfenstein at Quakecon and Wolfenstein’s minimum requirements being a X800, I feel obliged to ask whether the X800 and X1000 series will be receiving a driver drop next month? Coincidentally a quarter after the last Legacy driver drop in June. With both Wolfenstein and Batman: Arkham Asylum looking to be major hits and both being released this month and supporting the X1000 series, it’d be great to have an optimized driver to match them.
On a related note, I was wondering what you thought of my suggestion to have Major and Minor driver releases that I mentioned in the Cat 9.7 blog? With Major releases occurring quarterly, incorporating previous Minor releases, and supporting the newest 5 GPU generations and Minor releases occurring monthly and optimized to better support (ie. only support) the newest 3 GPU generations. Or is this too complicated/difficult to implement? I don’t know if this is something you could do a poll on?
I have asked the question about support for older generations cards, will post when I get an answer.
Your idea is a good one, I have passed it on to the Catalyst team for review.
Even I cant get it to work on fedora 11 kernel 2.6.29.. i was waiting since the distro release to enable 3d..
ATI DISAPPOINTS LINUX USERS TO A GREAT EXTENT…..!!!!
@yahoo, Isn’t this Fedora’s problem? I think you should rant there.
4870×2 owners are still getting white screen outs playing Arma2. The problem seems to be dual GPU related. It is commonly discussed on BIS forums. When can we expect a fix?
Please report this issue via Technical support – They can deal with it and hopefully offer a solution.
Hi Ian I am very happy with my AMD setup consisting of Phenom II 955, MSI 790FX mobo and XFX 4870X2. This rig can max out Crysis and Crysis Warhead (Enthusiast settings with 4xAA!!!)@1920×1200!!!! Every I game I have bought has been chewed up by this rig!
That is the power of AMD and I am loving it. The new drivers are amazing. I love my AMD rigs… and excited about ATI evergreen and Istanbul for AM3.
Btw I am curious to know how you got your gaming name “cabrtosr”. Could you enlighten us AMD faithful to how you came upon this name.
Many thanks to you Ian and all at AMD!
Richey
@Richey – CABRTOSR comes as a nickname from being a professional Scottish Highland Games Competitor… Literally meaning Tossing Cabers….
)
@Ian McNaughton,
Wow Ian I never realised you were a professional Highland Games competitor. You should talk it up more often! Thanks for clearing that up. Thats some serious strength you have got there!!
I reside in England but love going to Scotland for the scenery and the friendliness and warmth of the people. Its just a nicer place
AMD has some amazingly talented people and you definitely show this.
My regards to you and all at AMD!
Finally my main monitor is not blinking (so many times) when I’m switching input on my AVR (Onkyo TX-SR606) which is connected with TV and AMD ATI-4850 through HDMI. New drivers are awesome!!!
But still it’s is blinking – i guess thats problem because graphic card lost HDMI signal for a second or more.
And could be great if people will be able to send DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD through HDMI on ATI 4xxx series. I can’t
Best regards
The linux release notes are missing:
https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/catalyst_98_linux.pdf
The Linux release notes have been posted.
@Ian McNaughton, Thank you!
Ian could you post a link to the technical support you mentioned as I am having trouble locating it on the AMD site, thanks@Ian McNaughton,
I have found it, thanks Ian for making yourself available