Today, we are proud to announce that AMD has received Windows Hardware Certification (WHC) for an AMD Catalyst™ graphics driver on Windows® 8. This landmark moment reflects both our commitment to AMD Radeon™ graphics customers, and our vision of providing quality hardware/software solutions for Microsoft® Windows® products.
Formerly known as the Windows Logo Program, WHC is a rigorous mark of compatibility and reliability for products intended for use with Microsoft Windows. It also allows AMD to serve as an official partner in the upcoming Windows 8 release, use the “Windows 8 Compatible” logo (seen here), and offer the drivers on Windows Update.
Our certified driver has been successfully tested against several families of AMD Radeon™, AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), and AMD FirePro™ products. We’ll be able to detail these products in the days ahead.
In the meantime, we’re proud to mention that our certified driver fully supports the new WDDM 1.2 driver model. As applications are updated to leverage this model’s new features, users with compatible products and this certified driver will be treated to a host of new features:
•Native Stereo 3D support: Windows® 8 natively supports stereoscopic 3D gaming and videos via compatible applications. Middleware applications will not be required for such apps.1
•Unified Video API: Video playback has been integrated into the DirectX® 11 API, enabling simultaneous video and gaming content. Transcoding performance may also be improved for supporting applications.
•Optimized screen rotation for rotation-aware devices.
•Improved sleep/resume performance.
•Optimized GPU power consumption.
AMD’s Windows Hardware Certified driver will be posted later this summer after additional QA has been performed to ensure the highest reliability. For now, AMD customers interested in evaluating the new Windows® 8 Release Preview can test drive an evaluation AMD Catalyst™ driver we’ve made available on our Windows® 8 Release Preview driver page.