AMD Catalyst Omega 14.12 WHQL

AMD Catalyst Omega 14.12 WHQL. - AMD has the habit of making its year-ending driver release "memorable," by either coming up with sweeping performance increases, or introducing new features; and sometimes a mixture of both. The company named its latest such release the Catalyst 14.12 Omega.



With 2013-14, AMD stopped releasing WHQL-signed Catalyst releases on a near-monthly basis, and switched to a slower, almost quarterly Catalyst WHQL release cycle, with updates building on each of those WHQL releases being rolled out as betas and hotfixes. Some of these betas ship with some very important game optimizations, and are sometimes so far away from being incorporated into a WHQL release, that hardware reviewers like us, have been forced to keep our bench updated with these betas, at times. Catalyst 14.12 Omega is one such release. The driver we got ahead of its December 9th, 2014 launch, isn't WHQL-signed. It does come with an curious version string.

AMD Catalyst 14.12 Omega is a combination of new software features that spice up the feature-set of AMD's Radeon GPUs; and a handful game-specific performance updates, on paper. AMD's three focus areas with this release are, new features, performance updates, and improved image quality.

Catalyst changes and updates can be bulleted up towards these features.:

  •     Virtual Super Resolution (VSR)
  •     Video playback enhancements
  •     5K LCD Panel Support
  •     Frametime Frame Pacing enhancements
  •     Performance optimizations for APUs
  •     Performance optimizations for Dedicated graphics cards

Performance Optimizations versus AMD Catalyst 14.9 WHQL

  •     Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth performance optimizations - Mantle API activated for ultimate performance in Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Eart
  •     Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare performance optimizations - Up to 30% performance increases with FXAA and lower game resolutions
  •     Optimized AMD CrossFire Profile update for improved performance - Assassin's Creed Unity performance optimizations
  •     Single GPU performance improvements - Optimized AMD CrossFire Profile update for improved performance
  •     Dragon Age: Inquisition performance optimizations - Up to 15% performance increase in single GPU scenarios with Anti-Aliasing enabled.
  •     Optimized AMD CrossFire Profile update for improved performance
  •     Far Cry 4 performance optimizations - Up to 50% performance increase in single GPU scenarios with Anti-Aliasing enabled.


The most prominent one will be VSR rendering, you guys also know this as super sampling and as DSR from Nvidia. We'll walk through some of these features.

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