AMD Releases Catalyst 11.4 Driver

AMD earlier this week released the Catalyst 11.4 driver, introducing a couple of new features, and a bunch of performance updates. If the name “11.4” sounds familiar, it might be because we took a look at what was coming to the driver last month. Building on the overhaul AMD rolled out with Catalyst last year, 11.4 refines some aspects of the driver a bit further, such as with the branding scheme. Improvements have also been made to the configuration of multiple monitors.

Rather than rehash a lot of what I’ve said before, I recommend checking out the article linked-to above for all of the refinements made to the driver, as I go into some depth there. There are a couple of other improvements AMD didn’t talk about at that time, however, such as an upgraded OpenCL runtime, which enables the support of zero-copy on AMD’s APUs and also increases performance for PCI Express bandwidth between the CPU and GPU.

Here is a quick overview of performance updates:

• Call of Duty Black Ops – gains of up to 15% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single GPU configurations.
• Battleforge – gains of up to 15% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Batman Arkham Asylum – gains of up to 20% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Aliens vs. Predator – gains of up to 8% with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Civilization 5 – gains of up to 15% on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Far Cry 2 – gains of up to 6% on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Just Cause 2 – gains of up to 9% on single and multiple GPU configurations.
• Lost Planet 2 – gains of up to 10% on single and multiple GPU configurations.

You can read the full release notes here, which include a fair number of bug-fixes. Also, this driver has a Linux counterpart, and one that’s compatible with the just-launched version of Ubuntu. So, if you’re using that OS, it’s recommended that you upgrade as it’s likely to be much newer than what’s available in the Ubuntu repository.