AMD's ATI Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3 Preview @ [H]

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Brent_Justice

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AMD's ATI Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3 Preview -
AMD’s ATI Catalyst 10.2 and Catalyst 10.3 are receiving many improvements that directly benefit the gameplay experience. CrossFireX profiling system has been completely re-worked, Bezel Compensation is in play, and several other features have been added. If you are an ATI Eyefinity gamer, Bezel Compensation will take the experience one step further.
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Great features indeed. If 10.3 lets me switch seemlessly between eyefinity mode and extended desktop I will be a very happy man.

Now when can we download 10.2?
 
i believe guru3D has the the 10.2 beta drivers.. might want to check there..
 
Very nice AMD. Now please have a side menu like there used to be on CCC instead of that stupid drop down box.
 
Are you able to create your own profiles for CrossfireX? If not then this solution, while bette rthan what they had, still fails.
 
Did they miss mentioning easy to use profiles for 3d settings? I didn't see it mentioned, and since Nvidia has such a better system for that you would think they would implement something similar...
 
Cobalt35 said:
Are you able to create your own profiles for CrossfireX? If not then this solution, while bette rthan what they had, still fails.
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No creation of own profiles. However, you can force AFR rendering in any game by renaming the EXE of the game to AFR-FriendlyD3D.exe

Still, the benefits are great as moving the profiles out of the driver means they can provide profile updates via download, plus the multi-gpu code re-working might allow for a future feature such as profile creation
 
how does this effect us users that dont have eyefinity or crossfire. does it show a performance boost at all?
 
4LC4PON3 said:
how does this effect us users that dont have eyefinity or crossfire. does it show a performance boost at all?
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It is a monthly catalyst update and updates guaranteed each month. Updates usually include driver specific optimization for certain titles or games which can sometimes mean like 5-10% better performance even on single gpus. So their promise of monthly updates should mean good performance out of your hardware even on the latest titles and you'd have to wait less time for the optimization to occur or at least guaranteed not to have to wait any more than a month to see your next update for your video card's hardware. Sterescopic 3D features mentioned should apply to single-gpu /w single monitor situations if your interested in the idea of 3D gaming.
 
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Godmachine said:
I can just about hear you Brent from Texas going "Its about fucking time AMD!" :D

I got 2 more Asus 25.5 inch monitors coming this week and then its eyefinity time so I'm glad they are adding this in.
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I'm in NC now ;) And yes, as soon as I was briefed on this believe you me, I let them know very vocally how thrilled I was that this was finally coming to pass, and they know I've been yammering about that for a long time now, glad they are listening ;)
 
cool thanks for that tip, i jsut came back to pc gaming so all this is still a bit new to me
 
I was just looking at some of the pictures and it's nice to see ATI implement some type of bezel management, I just think they could have used a more elegant solution like Maxtor's triple head 2 go. One instance I could see it as a disadvantage is because mouse can hide behind bezel, item's behind bezel are no longer visible until you move your character ect, imagine playing Modern Warfare 2 online or any other FPS, ppl that get behind the bezel or if someone is hiding on the bushes and the bushes are simply behind the bezel then it turns the bezels into blind spots.
All they needed to do was shift the pixels vertically and re-size side images so that all 3 images fit in nicely together.
These are good examples of maxtors solution.
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/surroundgaming/en/product/bezel/

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/surr...trox_Monitor_Bezel_Management_White_Paper.pdf

I like their solution a little better when it comes to bezel management and they been doing multi-screen solutions since 2001.

I could be wrong since I actually have to see how it plays out on final release, but that's what I could analyze from the pictures and the articles.
 
Other than the bezel addition and the CrossfireX support for Eyefinity, this is nice to hear from AMD:
"AMD will support 3rd party vendors, and no one specific standard, but rather an open standard that middleware vendors will have access to."

Key words: "open standard."
 
Hat's off to AMD/ATI for supporting the [H]ard gamers out there by developing cutting edge technology like eyefinity and following it up with driver's that take it to the next level. This type of support makes it harder for me not take the leap into eyefinity.
 
Very exciting features in 10.3

The "Ultra Low Power State" is interesting as well, can the idle power for 5800 be even lower?
 
SixtyWattMan said:
Very nice AMD. Now please have a side menu like there used to be on CCC instead of that stupid drop down box.
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I just read an interview, over at elite bastards, with Terry Makedon, where he says this:

Man, with all the good stuff we have in Cat 10.2/10.3 I really don’t have anything too major to tease about now – well maybe a little something – a slight redesign of CCC has started internally ;-)
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So it's on its way :D
 
That small CF exe update is a nice feature.
EVGA or nVidia would release beta drivers with SLI updates.
Now they just need to add the simplier game profiles for adjusting per game settings.
 
I have been playing around with XML file atiapfxx.blb which you can fins in System32 and Program Files\ATI Technologies

They include a command line tool atiapfxx.exe thats supposed convert BLB to XML and vice versa which would allow people to create custom profiles.

Unfortunately I cant get it to work:
I have tried "atiapfxx -r -b atiapfxx.xml -s atiapfxx.blb"
But that gives me this error:
mxml: Bad control character 0x00 not allowed by XML standard!

Here is what I get before the program has an error:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><customisations Release="8.45.2" Format="1"><properties><driver Name="2D"><property Type="Boolean">DXIX</property></driver></properties><profiles><profile Driver="2D" Usage="2DScreensaver" Notes="2D note 1"><value Property="MGPU">None</value></profile></profiles><applications><application Title="Photoshop 3" File="Photoshop3.exe"><use Driver="2D">SuppressDXX</use></application></applications></customisations>

Also "atiapfxx -r -b atiapfxx.blb -s atiapfxx.xml" which crashes.

If we can get this tool working we will get some interesting stuff... It appears official releases are digitally signed (hence the BLB format) so I hope they haven't locked non-signed BLB files from the driver.

I also hope they add per-application anti alias and AF settings so I don't have to go into control panel to adjust them for every different game I play. NVIDIA have had this in their control panel for years...
 
very nice for multi GPU and Eyefinity users...but what about us single card users?...can we expect any performance increases or additional features with these upcoming drivers?
 
ellover009 said:
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The matrox solution also puts stuff behind the bezels exactly like the ati one - they are identical from what I can see?

The biggest problem will be hud for some games - if you are unlucky some of it might end up behind the bezel in which case you'd never be able to see it.

There's more then bezel management needed to get this working properly - other eye infinity problems are:
1) you need the game to *know* about eye infinity and put all of the hud in the centre screen, not behind the bezels or to the far left/right.
2) You also need angle management to compensate for the way the outer screens are angled (currently the game thinks it's drawing onto a big flat screen, not one with sharp angles).
3) You need it to work in dual screen mode in 2d windows (so you can have task bar only on middle screen - not across all three) - I don't think this is possible yet.

That said finally getting bezel correction and full xfire support (if it works) ticks two things off the list, so going down to 3 problems from 5 is a big step forward to making eye infinity work well.
 
BlueStorm said:
To the article author.. all of your comments about AMD "taking it a step farther" by allowing separate XML updates in between drivers are wrong.

NVIDIA has been doing this for months. On top of this, EVGA has been doing this for months as well, independent of NVIDIA.
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Maybe Brent hasnt updated his Nvidia drivers in a couple months. hehe
 
sbuckler said:
The biggest problem will be hud for some games - if you are unlucky some of it might end up behind the bezel in which case you'd never be able to see it.

There's more then bezel management needed to get this working properly - other eye infinity problems are:
1) you need the game to *know* about eye infinity and put all of the hud in the centre screen, not behind the bezels or to the far left/right.
2) You also need angle management to compensate for the way the outer screens are angled (currently the game thinks it's drawing onto a big flat screen, not one with sharp angles).
3) You need it to work in dual screen mode in 2d windows (so you can have task bar only on middle screen - not across all three) - I don't think this is possible yet.
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1) It's the developers that need to make their game work well with eyefinity, there is a huge list of games that are still vert- and ultra wide resolutions look stupid, much less getting the HUD right. It's a bit of a tough one because % of gamers with eyefinity is tiny and almost not worth considering from a development perspective.
2) Eyefinity creates one large flat plane it's not designed for people to angle their flanking monitors you simply won't get the correct perspective on the outer monitors, that's user error not a problem with the technology. Bezel management if anything makes that problem appear more obvious to the user.
 
I have been sitting on my hands waiting for the CrossFire support for EyeFinity.....yahoo!!!!

The new profiles downloads are really a great feature. Allows us to get updated game stuff without waiting for a month to go by........very nvidia-like.....and appreciated.

The one thing I think will still need to be worked out is the power-saving thing and it's effects on software like RivaTuner and Afterburner.
When this came on board in the 9.12 HF drivers, when you activate Afterburner, the computer will crash.........it's a conflict between AB and the powersaving stuff.

I like AB to see how my cards are utilized, so with this problem, can't use it.
Hopefully the RivaTuner guys will be able to work with ATI and get this fixed.

Can't wait to load up A v P tonight with these new drivers and get some EyeFinity action.
 
color independent use, bezelmanagment, etc...
update files, seems ati is on a roll to update their drivers and looks to something awesome....ness...

btw, playing star trek online using eyefinity is awesome.;)
 
So, let me get this straight, because I don't quite understand. 'one step further than nvidia' comes up several times in this article here, but from what I can tell, AMD still doesn't allow me to set per app AF / AA / VSYNC / XFIRE modes, and is more or less offering what EVGA has been doing for about two years with crossfire profile updates.

But you still can't go into the control panel and 'add application' then set it to AFR-2, vsync on, 2x AA, 16x af.

How exactly does this make the signifigantly less robust driver options I currently have on my 5870 crossfire setup better than the nvidia driver that has allowed all this functionality for years?
 
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