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AMD Offers a Performance Boost, Over 20 New Features With Catalyst Omega Drivers
MojoKid writes: AMD just dropped its new Catalyst Omega driver package that is the culmination of six months of development work. AMD Catalyst Omega reportedly brings over 20 new features and a wealth of bug fixes to the table, along with performance increases both on AMD Radeon GPUs and integrated AMD APUs. Some of the new functionality includes Virtual Super Resolution, or VSR. VSR is "game- and engine-agnostic" and renders content at up to 4K resolution, then displays it at a resolution that your monitor actually supports. AMD says VSR allows for increased image quality, similar in concept to Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA). Another added perk of VSR is the ability to see more content on the screen at once. To take advantage of VSR, you'll need a Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290, or R9 285 discrete graphics card. Both single- and multi-GPU configurations are currently supported. VSR is essentially AMD's answer to NVIDIA's DSR, or Dynamic Super Resolution. In addition, AMD is claiming performance enhancements in a number of top titles with these these new drivers. Reportedly, as little as 6 percent improvement in performance in FIFA Online to as much as a 29 percent increase in Batman: Arkham Origins can be gained when using an AMD 7000-Series APU, for example. On discrete GPUs, an AMD Radeon R9 290X's performance increases ranged from 8 percent in Grid 2 to roughly 16 percent in Bioshock Infinity.
I don't need any of those new fancy features.
What I need is their OpenGL driver complying with the OpenGL specification. Whenever I do anything advanced, it reliably works on my Nvidia system and reliably needs annoying and performance-degrading workarounds on my AMD/ATI system. We're talking about stuff like simple branching in shader code causing the optimizer to emit returns, or unnecessarily having to feed in vertex data when the geometry could be deduced from gl_VertexID alone, or the Uniform Buffer Object layout specified in the shader not being preserved when using the binary shader format (means I have to recompile it every time), or atan in shaders yielding results that are half a degree off under some circumstances, or the builtin attributes not working if you use your own attributes with names that would alphanumerically be sorted before gl_*.
Through the ATI support forum back then I once got in touch with a technician who looked up these things in the driver sources and confirmed a few bugs with me, but later on I only got automated responses stating that he is leaving the company, and then the forum was trashed and a new AMD forum put in its place.
Yes. This is driving me nuts. On Nvidia, it all just works as it should.