Introducing Omega
AMD remains publicly buoyant that its Radeon GPUs are highly competitive with Nvidia's latest Maxwell GeForce GTX 970 and 980 offerings. Nvidia may hold the single-GPU crown and be leading on power efficiency but competitive pricing and attractive game bundles are keeping Radeon in the game. But Nvidia's driver and software enhancements launched alongside high-end Maxwell haven't gone unnoticed by AMD.
As a direct response to Nvidia's software wizardry AMD has conjured up a few tricks of its own. AMD is delivering these in its latest driver update called Catalyst 'Omega'. Eagle-eyed readers may have already seen details about the Omega driver since they were unintentionally released ahead of schedule at the end of last week in the States. AMD's new Omega driver includes a seemingly endless array of new features that target frame pacing, resolution scaling and video quality. Omega is designed for AMD customers using APUs and GPUs with Radeon graphics, so many of the optimisations apply to both product segments.
The latest driver includes support for an improved video-processing algorithm which removes video contours caused by compression. Furthermore, AMD is bringing a '1080p detail enhancement' capable of making lower-resolution content appear as 1080p through manipulation of frequency response and noise parameters. We've seen the likes of this before, but AMD says Omega heralds a multitude of behind-the-scenes changes that combine for improved IQ.
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Carrying on with the theme of resolution manipulation, AMD is introducing its equivalent of Nvidia's Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) technology. AMD is calling this Virtual Super Resolution (VSR) and it effectively works the same way as DSR. Content is rendered at a higher resolution than the display can support and then downsampled to fit the user's native resolution.
The most common use for this would be rendering a game at, say, 3,840x2,160 (4K) and resizing it to fit on a 1,920x1,080 (1080p) display. The resolution displayed is technically identical, but the downsampling process provides better image accuracy.
For users in the reverse scenario, with 4K displays and 1080p content, AMD has added a feature which enhances 1080p up to '4K-like' quality. AMD claims a combination of detail enhancement and adaptive upscaling help to give the effect of 4K-quality, though, of course, this is no proxy for real 4K content.
We've already reported that 5K displays are going to make a proper retail arrival in 2015 and AMD's Omega driver adds out-of-the-box support for 5K monitors such as Dell's UP2715K. Another new display-feature is support for a jaw-dropping 24-display Eyefinity. Such a setup requires four GPUs to run successfully within Windows; that's six displays per GPU, and AMD claims no third-party hardware or software solutions are needed.
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Lastly, and most importantly, the new Omega driver is alleged to bring significant performance increases for AMD's latest Kaveri APUs and Rx 2xx series GPUs. In the rest of this driver review we'll be putting those claims to the test using a single Radeon R9 290, to see what performance gains are on offer.
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