14 DAY TRIAL // The AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11 Driver is out and promises a handful of fixes.
Since NVIDIA launched a beta driver especially for Far Cry 3, AMD's time to fight back has come. With the 12.11 version of the Catalyst, AMD's main concern is to improve Far Cry 3 graphics behavior on their adapters.
This is why the changelog for this version starts with the promise to boost your graphics performance by 25% at 8xMSAA, SSAO enabled @ 1600p, and by 15% at 8xMSAA, HDAO enabled @1600p. A prerequisite is to have AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 installed.
Now that we've cleared the air about what gaming performance, let's see what else is new.
Advanced Micro Devices says to have resolved the sporadic system hang encountered with a single AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPU seen on X58 and X79 chipsets, the intermittent hang encountered with AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs in a CrossFire Eyefinity setup, the image corruption found in certain DirectX 9.0c titles and the missing fonts issue in XBMC.
Regarding the Media Player Classic Home Cinema “no video” issue when using full or half floating point processing, AMD boasts to have eliminated the inconvenience.
As far as development goes, the producer did not forget the bugs reported in the previous versions, therefore resolving the stability issues of the AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 8 driver for Linux.
While we're on the Linux topic, the current release provides a fix for the Ubuntu 12.04 users experiencing issues with HDMI Audio. They should download the “dkms-hda-0.201211291615~precise1” package from here, install it and reboot.
As mentioned before, the AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP 2 is recommended for the best experience. This provides a new and improved profile for Far Cry 3 and is said to boost performance for single GPU configurations with AA.
Below are the download links, so you can stay “updated one minute ago.”
AMD Catalyst Display Driver 12.11 Beta 11