Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.1 driver:

AMD HD3D technology support enhancement

• Enables support for AMD HD3D technology in conjunction with AMD CrossFireX configurations
• Delivers a new Stereo 3D mode over HDMI 1.4a connections – 1080p at 30Hz is now enabled on supported displays.

AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements – Application Profiles

• AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver enables users to create per application profiles to individually control 3D and CrossFireX settings for Direct3D applications
• Please be sure to select the “Restore Factory Defaults” option under the Catalyst Control Center Preferences menu before using the new application profiles feature – this ensures there are no compatibility issues between previous drivers and the new AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver with regards to application profiles

AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements – Video UI improvements

• AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver includes user interface enhancements to simply adjustment of video color and video quality controls

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

• SLED 11 SP2 early look support
• Ubuntu 11.10 production level support

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.2 driver:

AMD Eyefinity 2.1 technology enhancements

• Additional resolution support: Users can now choose from a larger set of resolutions when running AMD Eyefinity
• Dynamic Configuration Changes: Switching between different display configurations will occur automatically when physically plugging/un-plugging displays
• HydraVision enhancements: The Windows Task bar can now be moved and resized based on users preference
• Profile Manager improvements: Increased support for Display Groups (including 5×1) and Extended configurations within the Profile Manager

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 11.12 driver:

AMD OpenGL 4.2 production support

• AMD Catalyst 11.12 delivers official support for the OpenGL 4.2 specification

AMD Eyefinity technology enhancements

• Enables support for AMD HD3D technology when using a 3×1 Landscape Eyefinity display group, on supported DisplayPort 3D monitors.

AMD Vision Engine Control Center enhancements for Dual Graphics

• Improvements have been implemented to better facilitate the enabling and control of the Dual Graphics within the Vision Engine Control Center

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 11.12 Linux driver:
This release of AMD Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems

• RHEL 6.2 early look support

AMD’s driver for the Windows 8 Developer build is also now available on www.amd.com for download.   This is the same driver that was made available through Windows Update when the Windows 8 Preview Build was released in September 2011.  AMD plans to release new drivers for Windows 8 on www.amd.com the same day as all future Windows 8 milestone releases (Beta, RC, RTM) – just as AMD did for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.1 driver:

AMD HD3D technology support enhancement

• Enables support for AMD HD3D technology in conjunction with AMD CrossFireX configurations
• Delivers a new Stereo 3D mode over HDMI 1.4a connections – 1080p at 30Hz is now enabled on supported displays.

AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements – Application Profiles

• AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver enables users to create per application profiles to individually control 3D and CrossFireX settings for Direct3D applications
• Please be sure to select the “Restore Factory Defaults” option under the Catalyst Control Center Preferences menu before using the new application profiles feature – this ensures there are no compatibility issues between previous drivers and the new AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver with regards to application profiles.

AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements – Video UI improvements

• AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver includes user interface enhancements to simply adjustment of video color and video quality controls

Performance highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.1 Preview driver (in addition to the AMD Catalyst 11.11c performance driver)

• Improves performance (10-15%) in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim when Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing is enabled on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6900 Series for single GPU and AMD CrossFire configurations

David Doel is on the marketing team at AMD Gaming Evolved. 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 links sites and no endorsement is implied.

The Frostbite 2 engine powers Battlefield 3 and was built exclusively on top of the DirectX® 11 API as a minimum requirement for the PC platform. Why was such a decision made and were you not concerned that excluding DirectX® 9/Windows® XP users would impact your potential customer base?

Battlefield as a game and DICE as a studio have a strong PC heritage. The first Battlefield games were created for the PC. We also have a philosophy at DICE that we want to develop our games to the best possible strengths of each individual platform.

In order to fully take advantage of a modern PC with a DX10 or DX11 card, and while making the game and engine future proof, going directly to DirectX 11 API was the right decision. Requiring that as a base was what would result in the best possible game experience.

We made a qualified guess in the beginning of the Frostbite 2 and Battlefield 3 development that the adoption of DX10/DX11 GPUs together with Windows Vista & Windows 7 would be high enough when we launched Battlefield 3 to reach a wide gamer audience, and Battlefield 3 as a major PC title would be a strong motivation for the last gamer hold outs to make the necessary upgrades to DX11 and Vista/Win7.

Coming back to DirectX® 11, do you feel you could have achieved the same level of graphics quality without this API? Could you give examples of what DirectX 11 hardware level features Battlefield 3 use?

I do not think we would have been able to achieve the same overall graphics quality in Battlefield 3 without DirectX 11; it is a great modern base for our engine and rendering systems.

We use multiple DirectX 11 hardware features in Battlefield 3 when users are running on a DX11 GPU:

• Tile-based lighting through Compute Shaders.
  We developed a novel technique for highly efficient dynamic lighting that scales up to hundreds of large light sources at high resolutions and with adaptive super sampling by dividing the screen into multiple small 16×16 regions (tiles) and have a DX11 compute shader evaluate the lighting contributions from all light sources.

• Terrain Displacement Mapping.
  The terrain in Battlefield 3 is built with high-res destructible heightfields that we stream when moving across the terrain which enables us to have very high terrain detail across large levels. On DX11 we are able to fully show the detail we have in the heightfields by using DX11 tessellation and displacement mapping. This creates very detailed & accurate silhouettes of the terrain in a distance and drastically reduces pops in terrain detail while flying over it.

• Shader Optimizations.
  We have quite a few shaders that take advantage of the increased capabilities of the DX11 Shader Model in order to increase performance.

• Object Instancing.
  A common problem with most engines is that the more objects & detail you want to show on screen, the more draw calls are issued on the CPU to the GPU and each draw call can have quite a lot of overhead, even in DX11.

In Battlefield 3 we wanted to have tons of objects being rendered at long view distances, esp. on the HIGH & ULTRA graphics quality settings and when flying over the landscape levels. We developed a comprehensive instancing approach where all of our different type of objects can be batched together into large single draw calls that draw multiple objects at the same time.

This significantly reduces the amount of draw calls on the levels. For example, on Damanvad Peak in ULTRA detail improved from 4000 draw calls to 900 draw calls which massively improved performance for both low-end machines and high-end machines.

What are the advantages of using virtual texturing for terrain rendering in Battlefield 3? How does your implementation differ from other terrain rendering techniques?

Most terrain rendering techniques are based on compositing multiple layers of textures and shaders over the terrain to represent different types of natural and artificial materials such as grass, sand, gravel, tarmac, etc. That was also what we did in Frostbite 1 with a very flexible technique we called Procedural Shader Splatting in which each terrain material could be represented as its own custom shader graph network that our level artists created.

For Battlefield 3 we wanted to further improve on the quality and the size of our landscapes and our new terrain virtual texturing system was a key part of that.

This new technique takes advantage of the major frame-to-frame coherence that exists in terrain texturing & shading; when you move over the terrain (even when flying) there are many portions of the terrain that look exactly the same over hundreds of frames. So instead of having the GPU shade & texture every pixel every frame with these complex & heavy terrain shaders, we instead render out parts of the terrain shaders and cache them in large dynamic virtual textures covering the entire terrain. This cache gets updated on-demand as you move over to the terrain.

This has multiple major benefits & implications:

• Improved Performance.
  As we’ve moved out a quite large chunk of our terrain shaders from being rendered at every pixel to instead be cached in the large virtual texture, we can save GPU performance in the rendering and reduce frame rate problems in complex areas.
• Higher Quality.
  Thanks to the performance we saved with this technique and because the virtual texture rendering is more scalable then tradition texturing, our level artists are able add a lot more variation and unique high quality details on the terrain to achieve even higher quality visuals.
• Longer View Distance.
  The virtual texturing technique actually enabled us to further increase the view distance of our terrain without removing significant layers of detail of the terrain quite close to the camera. The desert landscape on Operation Firestorm is a good example of this.
• Memory Usage.
  One drawback of the technique, beyond the complexity of implementation, is that it requires extra GPU memory for the virtual textures in addition to the normal terrain textures. This is not that much of a problem on PC though due to the generous amount of memory being available in modern GPUs that often have 1 GB, even 2 GB of RAM as in the AMD Radeon™ HD 6950s and HD 6970s.

• Elder Scrolls Skyrim
  • New in Catalyst 11.11b: Delivers AMD CrossFire performance scaling for AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
    • AMD Radeon HD 5000 CrossFire support will be supported soon in an updated driver
  • Improves performance 2-7% on single GPU configurations
  • Resolve corruption seen when enabling Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing on the AMD Radeon HD 6970 Series

• Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
  • New in Catalyst 11.11b: Delivers AMD CrossFire performance scaling

• Batman Arkham City
  • Improves DirectX 11 performance for single GPU configurations

• Rage
  • Delivers AMD CrossfireX performance scaling
  • Resolves a number of image / stability issues seen with the title:
    • Fix geometry corruption, sometimes seen in Bash TV entrance
    • Fix issues with Low-memory conditions on 32bit systems.
    • Fix issue with extreme corruption with missing textures on 32bit systems.
    • Fix memory leaks when deleting/reusing sync objects.
    • Fix hitching and pausing, especially noticeable on some Quad Core systems when doing races and Stanley Express runs.
    • Fix some missing shadows

• Battlefield 3
  • Resolves intermittent corruption seen when playing the game at specific camera angles

You can download this latest driver here.

David Doel is on the AMD Gaming Marketing team. 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 links sites and no endorsement is implied.

Refusing to kneel to the Syndicate, you take the fight to Steelport, a once-proud metropolis reduced to a struggling city of sin under Syndicate control. Take a tank skydiving, call in a satellite-targeted airstrike on a Mexican wrestling gang, and defend yourself against a highly-trained military force in the most outlandish gameplay scenarios ever seen, igniting a city-wide war that will set Steelport on fire.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K97u5usT9WY

Saints Row®: The Third™ gives you control of the Saints at the height of their power, and you live the life to show for it. Now Steelport is ripe for the taking, and it’s up to you to make the city your own. Mold the skyline based on your choices, outfit your crew in classy gangster gear or furry costumes, and make life-or-death decisions that will change Steelport, and the Saints, forever. This is now your city. These are now your rules. Strap it on.

• Impressive PC tech: With support for AMD Eyefinity technology and DirectX® 11, Saint’s Row: The Third is an over the top experience for all of your senses.
• Over The Top, the action is fun, and better than anything you can imagine.
• City of Sin: Disrupt and dismantle the Syndicate stranglehold on weapons and cybercrime. Discover the secrets of Steelport, where there is action on every street corner, for better or, more likely, worse.
• Weapons of Mass Destruction
• Initiation Station: Create, share, and download the most outlandish characters every seen, from washed-up celebrities to naked ninja pirates. Inside every sinner, there is a Saint.

Developed by: Volition Inc.
Published by: THQ

© 2011 THQ Inc. Developed by Volition, Inc. THQ, Saints Row: The Third, Volition, Inc. and their respective logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of THQ Inc. All Rights Reserved. All other trademarks, logos and copyrights are property of their respective owners.

• Meet or exceed the console player experience in terms of visual quality, stability, and framerate in both singleplayer and CO-OP play while supporting a range of hardware/software configurations
• Take advantage of DirectX® 10/11 features and allow users the ability to control display options settings via in-game menus and the display.ini file
• Ensure the game has solid mouse and keyboard controls paired with appropriate UI messaging while also maintaining gamepad support

In this development blog, we will outline some of the features we support in Saints Row: The Third and share some of the things we learned along the way.

Part 1 – Visual Features
Part 2 – Solid Controls
Part 3 – AMD Eyefinity

Part 1 – Visual Features

When we began work on the PC version of the game, our first order of business was to support at least the same set of features that the consoles had. We brought over every one of the features as they were being added to console, and converted them to DirectX® 11. But, we also started planning from the beginning to add additional features to take advantage of DirectX® 11.

Several obvious features that we felt any respectable PC game should support were CrossFire, additional resolutions, and an in-depth display options menu.  But, we also wanted to add a set of special rendering features that could only be done on PC.  Many options, like full SSAO and high resolution lighting and shadows, were obvious extensions of our existing engine features that we were able to improve thanks to the sheer power available on mid and high-end PC’s. Additionally, god rays and diffusion depth of field are expensive effects that can only be done in addition to everything else in Saints Row: The Third if you have the power of a PC.

The first new feature we wanted to take advantage of was DirectX® 10’s geometry shader support.  In RFA we did this by adding support for point-light shadows.  The shadows from a point light are rendered to all faces of a cube map simultaneously using a geometry shader.  In SR:TT we took this one step further by using a similar set of geometry shaders to render cube-map reflections for vehicles.

The vehicles on console do have real-time reflections, but they use a distorted low-res map that has to be rendered in two separate passes.  Thanks to the new technique, reflections are much higher resolution, completely undistorted, and can render with half the work by the GPU.  This required integration of geometry shaders into our material pipeline, which puts us on the road to supporting further DX10 features in the future.

The next new feature to take advantage of for us was compute shader support in DirectX® 11.  AMD had already assisted us in implementing a high quality diffusion depth of field effect that could run on any card with sufficient power.  The obvious addition to this was bokeh, which is what results in the little hexagonal shapes in stuff that is out of focus.

We used a compute shader to do real time image processing on the scene that took the depth of field into account.  From this we were able to generate thousands of little sprites which replace the bright highlights in the image with their bokeh shape counterpart.  Combined with the improved quality of diffusion depth of field using shader model 5, we ended up with a very cinematic look.

Overall, we are very happy with the visual direction for PC and think our players will be too.

Contributors:

Pictured: John Buckley, Jim Brennen, JT Hooker, Ben Truwe, Kate Nelson

JT Hooker, Senior Programmer
Jim Brennan, Principal Programmer
John Buckley, Principal Programmer
Kate Nelson, Associate Producer
David Bianchi, Systems Designer

The contents of this blog were provided by these employees of Volition Inc. The information and opinions presented in this presentation may not represents AMD’s position, strategies or opinions. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the content herein and no endorsements are implied.

EA and DICE were bold enough to release a beta of the game a few weeks ago, for us, drooling gamers, to get a taste of what’s coming at us. Now that the game is finally available, many sleepless nights are ahead of us for sure. The beta program also gave players a chance to look at system performance: what settings do I need in order to play the game with comfortable framerates, can my system handle it, and most importantly, do I want to upgrade my system.

In this guide AMD would like to offer some counseling around these topics. We understand that Battlefield 3 is not the only hot title this season, but it’s certainly one of the most demanding one in terms of hardware. Therefore we’re providing a little insight into what settings we think make sense for different levels of hardware.

In the chart below we identified some of the game settings for some different sets of hardware (CPU platform and graphics cards).

You’ll notice that we recommend the ‘Ultra’ preset in a few of our scenarios without the use of MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing). This is a traditional technique to remove aliasing from objects in the visible scene. It provides significant image quality improvements, at least in most cases. But because of its nature, working only on actual geometry, some objects will not benefit at all from this process, like foliage or fences, that are just textures, sprites etc. Luckily DICE implemented a new technique as well called FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing), which is a process that works pretty much on all objects. Another significant difference between the two is that while FXAA has a very small impact on performance, however using MSAA can essentially cut your framerate in half. Below you’ll find a few screenshots comparing the two techniques, where they’re effective and where not.

Note the difference on the left – the fence on the lower picture looks more cleaned up, whereas the images on the right will not show any difference in the fence quality.

As you can see in the highlighted areas the Image Quality has been slightly improved by using MSAA over FXAA. However again, there is a large performance trade off compared to using FXAA which can be seen via the FPS counter in the top right of the screenshots. Are the small improvements worth the large performance hit?

For these reasons we recommend not to use MSAA unless you’re running a CrossFireX™ configuration and really feel that the image on your screen contains lots of jagged edges.*

There’s a detailed performance guide that will be available sometime this week if you’d like get more granularity on the topic. With that, all I can say is happy fragging, and see you on the Battlefield!

Antal Tungler is a PR manager 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 links sites and no endorsement is implied.

* Disclaimer: The idea behind the following pages comparisons is not to discredit MSAA or the implementation of MSAA in Battlefield 3™. MSAA is a wonderful technique that can be used to improve the image quality of your gaming. Users should be wary however that MSAA will not improve all objects in the game and comes at a high performance cost to the user that may not be necessary for someone looking to maximize their performance and gaming experience. It is highly recommended that users take time to toggle settings themselves and determine if the Image Quality improvement that MSAA provides is worth the performance hit their frames per second will take well gaming.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRqfFfuVuNE

Battlefield 3’s new technology allows you to experience superior animation, unparalleled lighting and special effects, epic scale and incredible sound design. With support for AMD Eyefinity and DirectX® 11, Battlefield 3 leaps ahead of its time with the power of Frostbite 2, DICE’s new cutting-edge game engine. This state-of-the-art technology is the foundation on which Battlefield 3 is built, delivering enhanced visual quality, a grand sense of scale, massive destruction, dynamic audio and character animation utilizing ANT technology as seen in the latest EA SPORTS games.

The DICE team set out to bring animation to the next level. ANT technology lets them create more believable behavior than ever seen before in shooters. Simply put, in Battlefield 3 you will be able to engage in some of the largest maps ever created. Destruction is enhanced on both a macro and micro level. Chips fly off blocks of concrete used for cover, while whole facades and buildings collapse in screeching clouds of dust and debris. Frostbite 2 now enables deferred shading, dynamic global illumination and new streaming architecture. Play the game and experience the difference! Building on acclaimed high dynamic range (HDR) audio from previous Battlefield games, Battlefield 3 builds on the best-in-class legacy with a brutally realistic soundscape.

Developed by: DICE
Published by: EA

© 2011 EA Digital Illusions CE AB. Battlefield is a trademark or registered trademark of EA Digital Illusions CE AB in the U.S. and/or other countries. All rights reserved. EA and the EA logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Battlefield 3 and the DICE logo are trademarks of EA Digital Illusions CE AB. EA and the EA logo are trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=l72nOVg0euc

About the developer:
Based in Plano, Texas, Robot Entertainment is a world-class independent game development studio owned and operated by many of the founders of Ensemble Studios. With a team that has proven experience and expertise in creating games that appeal to massive audiences, Robot Entertainment is focused on titles that set new standards for their respective genres as well as groundbreaking original Intellectual Properties. Their output includes the Age of Empires series and Halo Wars for Xbox 360.

Developed by: Robot Entertainment
Published by: Robot Entertainment

Copyright ©2011 Robot Entertainment.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2Yhy8TCl54

Forced to become mechanically-augmented to save your own life, you soon find yourself chasing down leads all over the world, never knowing who you can trust. At a time when scientific advancements are routinely turning athletes, soldiers, and spies into super-enhanced beings, someone is working very hard to ensure mankind’s evolution follows a particular path. You need to discover where that path lies. Because when all is said and done, the decisions you take, and the choices you make, will be the only things that can change it.

Working with AMD, the developers of Deus Ex: Human Revolution are pioneering native AMD HD3D support for AMD Radeon products resulting in an extraordinarily unique visual experience. The support for DirectX® 11 powered by AMD Radeon continues, delivering improved tessellation – offering a more realistic rendering of objects -- plus improved depth of field and lighting. Multi-display AMD Eyefinity is also supported, giving you an incredible sense of your surroundings. Don’t just play the game, experience a revolution in AMD HD3D with AMD graphics and processors.

Developed by: Eidos Montreal
Published by: Square Enix

Deus Ex: Human Revolution © Square Enix, Ltd. 2011. Square Enix and the Square Enix logo are registered trademarks of Square Enix Holdings Co, Ltd. Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Deus Ex, the Deus Ex logo, Eidos, the Eidos logo, Eidos Montreal and the Eidos Montreal logo are trademarks of Square Enix Ltd.