AMD has announced the upcoming availability of a preview to its Catalyst 12.1 GPU drivers, up for download later today. Scheduled for launch in January 2012, these will be the first drivers supporting the firm's new Graphics Core Next architecture that will be present in the HD 7xxx line-up of GPUs, AMD's first major architectural redesign since the VLIW unified-shader architecture first implemented by the 2900XT (R600 series), almost five years ago.
This coming year is likely to be a challenging one for AMD's driver development team; despite repeated improvements in performance throughout 2011, AMD and previously ATI, have often lagged behind when it comes to stable drivers and 2011 was no exception, often with stable drivers unavailable at the launch of big name titles, the posting of faulty drivers and poor CrossFire support. The development team now has the challenge of combating a new architecture, which will no doubt present new behaviours requiring new driver workarounds and optimisations to be concocted.
Of course there are no HD 7xxx series graphics cards available just yet and so the focus of this preview is on general new functionality and fixes, below is a list of some of the changes and improvements:
- AMD HD3D has been enabled for CrossFireX configurations.
- Support for HDMI 1.4a displays at 1080p 30Hz.
- Per application profiles for 3D and CrossFireX settings of Direct3D applications.
- Simplified UI for video colour and quality control.
- 10 per cent performance improvement for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim when Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing is enabled on HD 6900 series.
