AMD Catalyst 15.5 Beta Driver for Windows OS out now

Warsam71

AMD Community Manager
Joined
Aug 6, 2013
Messages
140
Hello everyone,

Click here to download the driver.

Highlights:

Crossfire Profiles updates for:
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

(In addition to this graphics driver, there are additional manual steps AMD Radeon™ customers can take to further improve the performance of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Click here to learn more).

Performance Improvements for the following:
• The Witcher 3 - Wild Hunt: Up to 10% performance increase on single GPU Radeon R9 and R7 Series graphics products.
• Project Cars - Up to 17% performance increase on single GPU Radeon R9 and R7 Series graphics products.

Known Issues:
• The Witcher 3 - Wild Hunt: To enable the best performance and experience in Crossfire, users must disable Anti-Aliasing from the games video-post processing options. Some random flickering may occur when using Crossfire. If the issue is affecting the game experience, as a work around we suggest disabling Crossfire while we continue to work with CD Projekt Red to resolve this issue.

• Project CARS: Corruption may be observed if Anti-Aliasing is set to DS2M when run in Crossfire mode. As a workaround we suggest using a different Anti-Aliasing method.

Please refer to the Release Notes for more information.

For instructions on how to uninstall or install the AMD Catalyst Software Suite, you may refer to the following support resources:

• How-To Uninstall AMD Catalyst™ Drivers From A Windows® Based System
• How-To Install AMD Catalyst™ Drivers For A Windows® Based System

Please make sure to read the Known Issues sections to learn more about this version of the driver and use the Issue Reporting Form to report any bugs – Thank you!
 
Dying Light also has flickering AA Crossfire stuff. Lame. Oh well. remember, never get Crossfire. It don't really kinda sort of work.
 
Project Cars still runs like crap when Thunderstorm is selected as the weather and there is a 19 car grid on Azure Coast track.
 
Gain in TW3 is minimal, it raised minimum fps from 39~40 to 42. Average fps stays the same with sig rig (all Ultra + Hair off). I might need to fiddle with some settings in CCC since Radeon Pro refused to work with TW3.
 
Did you follow this tip? Make sure you read this if you are using CrossFire: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Optimizing-The-Witcher-3.aspx

This literally doubled my FPS using CrossFire. I went from 45-50 fps at 2560x1440 High to 85-90fps, and 70 fps at Ultra (HairWorks off). Definitely make this change:

Significant improvements to the performance of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt can be realized on AMD CrossFire™ technology configurations by adjusting the anti-aliasing settings.
Users are encouraged to change the EnableTemporalAA setting from TRUE to FALSE in the application's Rendering.ini file. This configuration file can be found in the \bin\config\base folder of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's installation directory.
Users are strongly encouraged to alter this setting, as flat to negative multi-GPU performance scaling may be encountered if this optimization is not performed.

Alternatively, users can access The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's postprocessing options menu and set anti-aliasing to off.
 
So this is what I've found.

For me at 2560x1440 the game is very close to steady 60fps at Ultra settings with just foliage, Shadows and Background Characters set to High. I have HBAO+ on but HairWorks off. I am using RivaTuner to lock the game to 60fps rather than in-game, it seems to work better.

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Pretty good, as long as you can maintain 60fps frametimes are great. They drop to around 30-35ms if you drop under 60, with a few larger spikes. That could probably be improved or I could turn settings down further.
 
i easily doubled my fps with the drivers too. went from 30-40s all high to 45-60 Ultra and hairworks 8x. (no AA)

i also solved the texture flicker on xfire. just set Vsync ON/Unlimited FPS.
 
That has helped, but hasn't fixed it completely.

Sam, there are some pretty noticeable shadow flickers with CrossFire on in TW3. Does the driver team have plans to improve/fix this?
 
From the OP

Known Issues:
• The Witcher 3 - Wild Hunt: To enable the best performance and experience in Crossfire, users must disable Anti-Aliasing from the games video-post processing options. Some random flickering may occur when using Crossfire. If the issue is affecting the game experience, as a work around we suggest disabling Crossfire while we continue to work with CD Projekt Red to resolve this issue.
 
Good to hear it's improving performance for you guys. Need more people without crossfire to post though heh.
 
Always good to see work done to improve a game performance.

I'm not a Witcher fan, but I sure appreciate tips to improve a game.
 
Seems to be a mild improvement in minimum frames for me. Really tough to say for certain though, the BenQ arrived just a few hours before this driver was released.
 
This new driver runs fine on my single 290x. Seems to push the card a bit harder than the last driver in witcher 3.
 
Sweet, and I disable AA anyway, since it really isn't necessary once you get a really high pixel density.

Granted, I can always tell the difference in still shots when looking for it, but in game my eye just can't really see the difference in motion and I prefer to raise other graphical effects than take an AA hit. IMO, AA is really more of a "low resolution fix" where the jaggies slap you in the eyeballs, and low resolution users probably aren't running crossfire anyway.
 
Using them now, Project Cars runs fine maxed out at 4K

How is your frame rate on Azure Coast with Thunderstorm weather enabled and about 19 cars? Was thinking about a second 290. ;)
 
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