AMD Catalyst™ 15.7 Driver - enabling a premium Windows® 10 experience - and so much more Posted by
ehudson in
AMD Corporate on 08-Jul-2015 09:33:50
When AMD launched the AMD Catalyst™ Omega driver, we expected the world to take notice, but we were blown away by the amount of interest a single driver can generate. In only 6 months, our drivers – including Catalyst Omega - were downloaded over 40 million times. The best part: overall customer satisfaction went up by 19%! Now it’s the time to continue what we started in December and deliver another great driver for a great OS: Windows® 10.
Entertaining. Intuitive. Seamless Windows 10 was designed to create a new generation of Windows for the 1.5 billion people using Windows today (
http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/06/01/hello-world-windows-10- available-on-july-29/). AMD processors enable premium experiences across the expanding Windows® 10 ecosystem.
AMD and Windows® 10 deliver a first-class entertainment experience by making games and streaming video look better than ever, while making the PC experience more personal, more productive and seamless across devices. Today, AMD released Catalyst 15.7, a WHQL certified, preview driver for Windows® 10 that will help enrich the user experience through more reliable performance, innovative features and technologies. The AMD Catalyst™ driver will continue to be improved and be fully integrated with Microsoft® Windows 10 as part of the Windows
driver update component.
- AMD helps Windows 10 stream content at the highest resolutions (4K and beyond) thanks to the hardware-based HEVC decoder
- HEVC DECODE with Xbox® Video Player
- STREAMING Xbox® One™ to PC
- Ready for the latest gaming technologies in Windows® 10
- Games will look great on your AMD-based PC running Windows® 10 because all 2015 AMD APUs will provide support for Microsoft DirectX® 12 and AMD FreeSync™
- Enabling up to 15X more details in games using DirectX® 12 (AMD Internal Testing. 3DMark API Overhead Feature Test. System Configuration: Intel i7-5960X, 16GB DDR4- 2666, 2TB Seagate HDD, AMD Radeon R9 390 GPU, Driver 15.20-150609a-184226E, Windows 10 v.10130. 18,463,548 draw calls per second in DirectX® 12, and 1,172,587 in DirectX® 11.)
- Supports WDDM 2.0 which works with Windows® 10 to reduce the driver workload on graphics hardware. Display modes can be changed quickly and without the bothersome flicker that Windows users had to endure in the past.
Cooler. Quieter. Power Efficient Catalyst But that’s not all. Much like all AMD Catalyst driver updates, AMD Catalyst 15.7 comes packed with features and performance increases. Most notable capabilities include
- Frame Rate Target Control (FRTC) enables fine-tuning your graphics card for more stable and consistent performance in games with real-time frame rate control limiting the maximum frame rate during gameplay — and delivers the benefits of reduced system/GPU power consumption, lower system temps, and lower fan speeds for quieter operation.
- This allows reduced system/GPU power consumption, reduced system heat and lower fan speeds (less noise)
- Virtual Super Resolution provides image quality enhancement to gamers and Windows desktop users (renders at high solution then down-scales; giving effective Super Sample Anti-Aliasing)
- Now supported on AMD Radeon™ R7 260 and above GPUS and desktop A-Series 7400K and above APUS in AMD Catalyst 15.20, with Single and Multi-GPU configurations with more supported VSR modes!
- FreeSync eliminates screen tearing without all the usual lag and latency. And now it works in Crossfire™ mode! You just need a FreeSync capable AMD component and a FreeSync compatible monitor. FreeSync CrossFire support is enabled on applications based on DirectX® 10 or newer (DirectX® 11 and DirectX® 12) and does not currently support AMD Dual Graphics APU configurations
Developing for Developers Developers are at the core of what we do. Because better content doesn’t just happen, it’s created. We are enabling new features in some of the familiar tools just for them:
- GPU Perf Studio 3.3 (coming end of July)
- Windows 10
- DirectX® 12
- OpenGL 4.5
All you need to do to experience all these benefits is to click on the link below. Enjoy it!
Sasa Marinkovic is Head of Software Marketing for AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied. DirectX, Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the US and other jurisdictions.