AMD släpper Catalyst 14. Release Candidate

Fresh drivers are a critical part of a good flow in recent games and are therefore something of great interest among hardware enthusiasts. AMD has released a number of Beta-labeled drivers in recent months, but it is four months since a stable version with WHQL certification was released.

Now AMD is releasing Catalyst 14.4 Release Candidate, which is the version AMD hopes will get WHQL labeling from Microsoft. The version is based on the Beta driver SweClockers used in the review of the Radeon R9 295X2 and the latest update of the test suite, and comes with a number of optimizations for Crossfire, Mantle and OpenGL.

First out are smoother rendering times in Crysis 3 and better performance in Far Cry 3 when using three or four graphics cards. For Anno 2070 and Metro: Last Light, up to 34 and 10 percent higher performance in Crossfire are mentioned. Finally, flicker in Titanfall with the Crossfire on should be eliminated.

For Mantle, bug fixes are mentioned in Battlefield 4, which nowadays do not lose performance when the user changes windows / Alt-Tab. Support for the OpenGL open interface is also being polished and according to AMD, all features in OpenGL 4.4 are supported.

The AMD Catalyst 14.4 RC is available for download from the AMD website and is compatible with Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 in 64-bit and 32-bit.