AMD Catalyst 14.9.2 Beta Driver for Windows and for Civilization: Beyond Earth

W

Warsam71

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

Click here to download the driver. In addition, this driver is only supported on GPU's that are based on the GCN architecture. Please refer to the release notes for more information.

Note that this is the required driver for Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth. AMD Radeon gamers that want the best possible performance with Mantle must install this driver.

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 Feature Highlights and 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!
 
Hey Warsam71 I would love to try Mantle, however whenever I am running this with mantle I am getting temps that make Furmark blush. For instance I am running a 7950 Boost even at boost clocks of 925 mhz and 1250 on the ram, which is no increase in power limit I am seeing a constant 80 C clocks which push about 65 percent fan speed.

Now I know this is all relative and maybe I have crappy cooling on the card whatever, but just for a reference I have ran Ryse, Wolfenstein, SC2, Diablo 3 what have you and I have never seen temps this high.

Furmark doesn't even hit this. Not to mention when I run Civ Beyond Earth without Mantle it is about a full 10 C cooler.

What makes this game so special. I mean how could any modern laptop ATI GPU run it without burning up?

The game has a constant 100 percent GPU utilization, but barely touches the memory foot print and comes in under 1 GB.

Is anyone else seeing this?
 
Warsam71, any status update on the Catalyst 14.9 Chipset driver issue with the missing/pulled SM Bus driver?
 
BF4 Mantle Crossfire memory leak that has been there since July 8th?

Still not fixed if Battlelog is to be believed.
 
Tried these last night and I get random system crashes. PC completely shuts down without notice. Going back to older set of drivers.
 
Rogue_Apprentice said:
Tried these last night and I get random system crashes. PC completely shuts down without notice. Going back to older set of drivers.
Click to expand...

I installed these on the system I have in my living room when I wanted to try continuing my Civ:Beyond Earth game out there. That system runs an i7-3770 on a Z77 motherboard and a Radeon HD7950 connected to my home theater via HDMI, and runs Win7-x64. I get a similar problem. Every once in a while, the system just locks up. I get a weird pattern on the screen, and a flat tone from the sound system. I have to hit the reset button on the pc to get back in. There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to when it happens. Sometimes it happens when I'm watching a video file, sometimes when I'm just navigating through folders. The system has good ventilation and a strong power supply, and has been able to perform cpu- and gpu-intensive tasks on prior drivers without issue.

I think this machine was running a set from the Cat14.6 range before this, I'm going to try installing the Cat14.9b1's since they work find on my game PC that's got the R9-290X and i7-4790K.

Does anyone know specifically what the Beta2 driver offers in terms of Civ:Beyond Earth performance improvements? My R9-290X system running the Beta1's already runs the game quite smoothly in Mantle, if that system's going to have the same issues I'd just as soon not bother with the Beta 2's on it.
 
that sounds like a thermal shutdown from he CPU, what are your temps like?
 
Warsam, are you planning to put back the support for downsampling that you removed with 13.1?
 
The Mac said:
that sounds like a thermal shutdown from he CPU, what are your temps like?
Click to expand...

They *should* be fine. It's not like I have any real-time temp monitor running on the screen at all times, though. But this machine routinely will run LONG batches of x264 encoding jobs that will have the cpu running hard for hours if not days non-stop and it's never keeled over. I install the Beta 2 drivers, and the machine randomly locks up while just navigating through Windows folders? Call me crazy, but if that's a thermal issue, then the driver has a SERIOUS bug in it that's making either the gpu or cpu temp spike.
 
encoding jobs use the VCE hardware, with the shaders doing the grunt work. the clocks are no where near 3d clocks, and generate way less heat.

get aida64 and log your temps.

That is assuming you are using the GPU, and not quicksync for your encoding jobs.
 
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The Mac said:
encoding jobs use the VCE hardware, with the shaders doing the grunt work. the clocks are no where near 3d clocks, and generate way less heat.

get aida64 and log your temps.

That is assuming you are using the GPU, and not quicksync for your encoding jobs.
Click to expand...

I'm using neither. Like I said, I'm using x264. As in x264.exe, a specific program, which does not contain any gpu-based acceleration. It is multi-threaded, so it's keeping all the cores of the cpu busy.

Plus, I never install the hardware video encoding/decoding components of the Catalyst drivers. I've never needed them.

I hadn't done any encoding after installing the Beta2 drivers, I hadn't done ANYTHING to drive up either the cpu or gpu temps. I hadn't even had Civ:BE running for more than a few minutes. And after one reboot, I didn't do anything beyond browsing a few folders before it happened again. Plus, once I uninstalled the Beta2's, the problem went away.
 
K, why would you not use quicksync or VCE?

wouldnt they be faster?
 
I downloaded these for my AMD system......

Core i7 4770K @ 4.3 GHz, ASUS Maximus VI Formula,16 GB Vengence 1866, MSI R9 290X in Crossfire, W7 Pro x-64

I uninstalled the prior drivers I always do and just like in the instructions, plus I run driverCleaner.net. The old drivers were 14.4

I installed 14.9 Beta2 and I get three screens of random colored blocks. I thought the D/L might be corrupted so I did it again, same result......

WTF?

Generally I've never, ever had a driver change go bad......maybe they weren't very good or didn't improve anything, but they've never completely corrupted the graphics output like this.......thanks.
 
The Mac said:
K, why would you not use quicksync or VCE?

wouldnt they be faster?
Click to expand...

Those still have crappier quality compared to CPU-only encoding.

I uninstalled the prior drivers I always do and just like in the instructions, plus I run driverCleaner.net.
Click to expand...

That's funny, I don't see using the DriverCleaner tool in the official uninstall or install instructions. It probably isn't the cause of your issues, but using a driver cleaner is unnecessary at this point.
 
Temporarily lost USB keyboard and mouse functionality, which is a first, installing this driver. Had to RDP from another machine to click on the finish dialog to ensure it installed properly. Keyboard and mouse functionality restored after the reboot. Wonder if it had to do with the new USB filter component that was installed. BF4 running smooth on R9 270X with Mantle without frame dips, texture glitch, app crash, etc. so far.
 
magoo said:
I downloaded these for my AMD system......

Core i7 4770K @ 4.3 GHz, ASUS Maximus VI Formula,16 GB Vengence 1866, MSI R9 290X in Crossfire, W7 Pro x-64

I uninstalled the prior drivers I always do and just like in the instructions, plus I run driverCleaner.net. The old drivers were 14.4

I installed 14.9 Beta2 and I get three screens of random colored blocks. I thought the D/L might be corrupted so I did it again, same result......

WTF?

Generally I've never, ever had a driver change go bad......maybe they weren't very good or didn't improve anything, but they've never completely corrupted the graphics output like this.......thanks.
Click to expand...

Try using DDU to uninstall the old drivers. Maybe drivercleaner missed something. :)
 
magoo said:
I downloaded these for my AMD system......

Core i7 4770K @ 4.3 GHz, ASUS Maximus VI Formula,16 GB Vengence 1866, MSI R9 290X in Crossfire, W7 Pro x-64

I uninstalled the prior drivers I always do and just like in the instructions, plus I run driverCleaner.net. The old drivers were 14.4

I installed 14.9 Beta2 and I get three screens of random colored blocks. I thought the D/L might be corrupted so I did it again, same result......

WTF?

Generally I've never, ever had a driver change go bad......maybe they weren't very good or didn't improve anything, but they've never completely corrupted the graphics output like this.......thanks.
Click to expand...
I have this happen from time to time with my XFX 290 when I'm installing new drivers. It's happened with multiple driver versions so I don't believe it's driver version specific. It's either a general very rare bug with installation or a defect of some kind with the actual card. It only happens to me about 5% of the time during driver installs so I haven't worried about it much.

However we could very possibly be experiencing different issues because the fix for me is just a quick system reset and all is well. It actually happened to me with this driver install. I took a picture of the screen corruption that I'll toss up if I can find it.
 
Goomz said:
I have this happen from time to time with my XFX 290 when I'm installing new drivers. It's happened with multiple driver versions so I don't believe it's driver version specific. It's either a general very rare bug with installation or a defect of some kind with the actual card. It only happens to me about 5% of the time during driver installs so I haven't worried about it much.

However we could very possibly be experiencing different issues because the fix for me is just a quick system reset and all is well. It actually happened to me with this driver install. I took a picture of the screen corruption that I'll toss up if I can find it.
Click to expand...

Never happen to me.
I use amd uninstall, install new driver.
no issues
seems more like a dodgy card.
 
This is what it looks like when it happens on my XFX 290. Only happens during driver installs/uninstalls and not all the time so I'm not sure if I should be worried or not.

 
Goomz said:
This is what it looks like when it happens on my XFX 290. Only happens during driver installs/uninstalls and not all the time so I'm not sure if I should be worried or not.

Click to expand...

Mine looks similar, except larger blocks and not as uniform.
Like I said, I've never seen this before on a driver change, ever.
I've probably changed driver hundreds of times, using the same protocol every time.

I've changed driver versions half a dozen times on these GPUs and never had a problem.

Like I said .......WTF?
 
I did my normal uninstall -> reboot -> install new drivers.

On my Asrock Extreme9 990FX these drivers caused a bluescreen with the Etron USB3.0 controller when switching from the boot menu to where the splash screen would start. I booted off a Knoppix DVD and tried copying some older driver versions over and that would get me to booting without a BSoD but have zero USB functionality (even in Safe Mode). I couldn't even log into my account at the Windows startup because I no longer posses any PS/2 backup devices.

After a few attempts the Windows "hey we see you've been crashing a lot, do you want to System Restore?) prompt come up on a boot. System restore back to 13.5 drivers worked. I tried installing 14.9b2 again with the USB filter driver unchecked and again it stuck me at the BSoD issue until another system restore.:confused: How can I proceed to update my drivers without this happening? I wish we still had separate packages for the graphics drivers from all the chipset and RAID drivers like in years past..
 
DedEmbryonicCe11 said:
I did my normal uninstall -> reboot -> install new drivers.

On my Asrock Extreme9 990FX these drivers caused a bluescreen with the Etron USB3.0 controller when switching from the boot menu to where the splash screen would start. I booted off a Knoppix DVD and tried copying some older driver versions over and that would get me to booting without a BSoD but have zero USB functionality (even in Safe Mode). I couldn't even log into my account at the Windows startup because I no longer posses any PS/2 backup devices.

After a few attempts the Windows "hey we see you've been crashing a lot, do you want to System Restore?) prompt come up on a boot. System restore back to 13.5 drivers worked. I tried installing 14.9b2 again with the USB filter driver unchecked and again it stuck me at the BSoD issue until another system restore.:confused: How can I proceed to update my drivers without this happening? I wish we still had separate packages for the graphics drivers from all the chipset and RAID drivers like in years past..
Click to expand...


err?

I have the same motherboard bios version 1.70. I have a different cpu, but i have the same video card as well. I installed the new drivers with out a problem.

You probably have some usb 3.0 device causing a instability. Try moving your devices to a usb 2.0 port and report back.
 
I no longer uninstall AMD drivers. I use DDU to remove them as it doesn't mess with the USB drivers. Sometimes the AMD uninstaller will take the USB driver off the system if you have an AMD based motherboard. Make sure that you allow DDU to do it's thing when it asks to enter safe mode.
 
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The Mac said:
K, why would you not use quicksync or VCE?

wouldnt they be faster?
Click to expand...

If you look around for articles on various tech sites that do thorough comparisons between x264 and the various hardware-accelerated encoders from AMD, Nvidia and Intel, you'll see two themes emerge. 1) the hardware encoders do not offer the same level of quality when it comes to the output. Whether this is just because their code sucks or they don't make use of the advanced options available in Mpeg-4 AVC, I don't know. But x264 lets you tweak the parameters of your encode to your heart's content. 2) The hardware encoders don't actually offer that much of a speed increase over x264, definitely not enough to justify the loss in quality. I use pretty high-quality settings for my encodes, however my output files are at a somewhat modest resolution of 512x288 so that the file sizes aren't too big, or else my server would have run out of space a LONG time ago. With those parameters, x264 on my i7-3770 machine runs consistently over 100fps. That's more than fast enough for my needs. Plus, since x264 is a simple command-line tool it's easy to incorporate into a batch file so I can set up an encoding job for a large group of source files and just let them run. I've even got my systems set up so that 2 of my computers can work on the same set of source files simultaneously without duplicating each other's work(each one just pulls out the next file in the shared source folder, encodes it, puts the output in the results folder and the processed source in the "done" folder, then grabs the next one up in the pile, lather rinse repeat).

Of course, none of that is actually relevant, since whether it's cpu or gpu-dependent, I didn't start any encoding jobs after installing the Cat14.9b2's. They crashed just from normal, non-stressful Windows navigation.
 
ebduncan said:
err?

I have the same motherboard bios version 1.70. I have a different cpu, but i have the same video card as well. I installed the new drivers with out a problem.

You probably have some usb 3.0 device causing a instability. Try moving your devices to a usb 2.0 port and report back.
Click to expand...
I have the same BIOS version. I still get my USB drivers hosed up every time I try installing 14.9.b2. Even with the USB filter driver unchecked the installer is doing something.


After rebooting all USB3 ports do not function. Devices have no power or connectivity. They work in the USB2 ports. I had to uninstall the Etron drivers then reinstall them to get the ports working again. Which Etron driver are you using? The old one from the Asrock website (v0.115) or the newest one from the Etron website (v0.118)?

Are you using the AMD filter driver at all?
 
I have the same problem with the latest intel usb 3 drivers, the installer bombs out and leaves unkown devices in the device manager.
 
DedEmbryonicCe11 said:
I have the same BIOS version. I still get my USB drivers hosed up every time I try installing 14.9.b2. Even with the USB filter driver unchecked the installer is doing something.


After rebooting all USB3 ports do not function. Devices have no power or connectivity. They work in the USB2 ports. I had to uninstall the Etron drivers then reinstall them to get the ports working again. Which Etron driver are you using? The old one from the Asrock website (v0.115) or the newest one from the Etron website (v0.118)?

Are you using the AMD filter driver at all?
Click to expand...

I install the driver package as a whole. So yes I use the usb filter driver. I actually use the default Windows driver (Windows 8.1 pro). I also have the Asrock XFastusb program installed.

usb30_zps946b56e5.png


To be completely honest though I have 3 usb 3.0 compatible devices. 2 of them work just fine, the 3rd which is my Blu-ray drive in a external housing will cause my computer to lock up from time to time. I hate usb 3.0 devices they cause issues in my experience, soon as I plug in the same devices to usb 2.0 they always work.
 
Goomz said:
This is what it looks like when it happens on my XFX 290. Only happens during driver installs/uninstalls and not all the time so I'm not sure if I should be worried or not.

Click to expand...

I spent 2 hours last night trying AGAIN, to install 14.9 Beta2.
I uninstalled using every damn uninstaller on earth, tried 14.9, 14.9 Beta1 and 14.9 beta2 and I keep getting those artifacts as soon as the desktop transitions from the windows screen to the desktop. Without fail.

I even had a problem at the last reverting to 14.4, I had to manually remove all ATI/AMD folders and reinstall.

This is FUBAR"d.
 
None of my FOUR computers accept 14.9 drivers. The laptops freeze, and the desktops crash. Staying put for now.
 
It seems like a lot of people are having problems with these but I haven't had any issues on my 290X CF system.

Magoo, try pulling one card from the system, installing the drivers, and seeing if it works. If it does, then add in the second card.
 
Rizen said:
It seems like a lot of people are having problems with these but I haven't had any issues on my 290X CF system.

Magoo, try pulling one card from the system, installing the drivers, and seeing if it works. If it does, then add in the second card.
Click to expand...
Watercooled..
Thanks for that though.
I did consider disabling X-Fire.
Maybe I'll give it a go.
 
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This drivers definitely have a problem with USB devices.. in my two machines with AMD cards the same problem are present with 14.9, 14.9.1 and 14.9.2. all USB ports work but work bad, for example if I try to move music, videos to a pendrive after being disconnected the pendrive its unable to play any of the songs or video.. just a "PRRRRRRRRR" sound in the media player.. it happen only with those version of drivers.. also the USB 3.0 speeds are just horrible at just 2 - 5mbps.. tested again with my GTX 780 problem gone away.. re-tested with my 660TI again problem aren't present. swapped to 7870XT problem present.. swapped to 780 problem gone.. and again for last time to my 280X and guess what problem still present.. I can transfer documents and other stuff but no movies or music because it get automatically corrupted.. all of this test are in my personal machine with the specs in sig.. so, sadly this time i'm back to my GTX 780 and put the 280X in the box for some time until this problem are solved..
 
Also, if you guys are having problems, try using Display Driver Uninstaller: http://www.wagnardmobile.com/

Reboot into Safe Mode and fully uninstall all the drivers using this utility, clean all the installed driver files off your PC, and then install the new drivers after a reboot. This has always worked for me.

If you still have problems, report the issues on their driver bug form: http://www.amd.com/report
 
Rizen said:
Also, if you guys are having problems, try using Display Driver Uninstaller: http://www.wagnardmobile.com/

Reboot into Safe Mode and fully uninstall all the drivers using this utility, clean all the installed driver files off your PC, and then install the new drivers after a reboot. This has always worked for me.

If you still have problems, report the issues on their driver bug form: http://www.amd.com/report
Click to expand...



Thanks for the info.
I finally got the drivers to load.
I have used DDU in the past, but this time I did this:

Disabled Crossfire, Overdrive and Afterburner.
Booted to safe mode.
Ran DDU.
Rebooted.
Ran the 14.9 Beta2 install.

SO NOW.....

I played Metro LL Redux for all of 5 minutes and the computer just flat out shut itself off.
I had to turn the PSU off at it's switch and restart it.
No BSOD, nothing. Just like someone flipped a switch.
I didn't believe it so I tried Crysis 3............same shit.

Jesus Christ.........:rolleyes:

I tried 14.9 whql and got an instant freeze up when I tried to load any game.
Had to hard restart.

I finally gave up on these and wiped them clean and went back to 14.4
Too bad I like the new EyeFinity setup software.

Guess I have to wait for 14.10.
 
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