AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta provides support for Mantle and improved Frame Pacing

A large part of 2013 was characterized by uneven rendering times, something AMD took on and worked on for most of the year. The solution is called “Frame Pacing”, but in its current form there are limitations in both hardware and software for it to work in higher resolutions on all graphics cards.

Documents are now being leaked online, revealing several major news in the next version of AMD’s drivers. In Catalyst 14.1 Beta, Frame Pacing will work in resolutions over 2,560 x 1,600 pixels and multi-screen solutions with Eyefinity together with graphics cards without the Crossfire technology XDMA, which is run via the PCI Express bus instead of a dedicated Crossfire bridge. Frame Pacing also comes with Dual Graphics, where an A-series APU is connected to a dedicated graphics card.

Catalyst 14.1 Beta will also be the first driver to support AMD’s Mantle interface, which will offer major performance improvements over DirectX. Previous data speaks of up to 45 percent better performance in Battlefield 4 and higher performance gains than that in scenarios where the processor would otherwise be a bottleneck.

There is also support for Trueaudio, which gives game developers greater opportunities to produce more voices, effects, filters and provides more precise positioning with everything from lavish surround systems to stereo speakers. All this without increasing the load on the processor.

Finally, support for DirectX 11.2 can be seen, which was introduced in connection with Windows 8.1 and offers, among other things, “tiled resources”. All graphics cards in the Radeon HD 7000, HD 8000 (OEM) and Radeon 200 series must support all the features of the latest DirectX version.

AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta is expected to be released sometime in January.