Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.2 pre-certified driver:

Windows 7 and Windows Vista support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

• Enables support for Windows 7 64-bit/32-bit and Windows Vista 64-bit/32-bit
• Windows XP support will be made available in AMD Catalyst 12.4

Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing is now available for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications

• Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900 and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series
• Users can now enable Super Sample Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing through the AMD Catalyst™ Control Center for DirectX® 10 and DirectX® 11 applications
• Applications must support in game Anti-Aliasing for the feature to work (Forced on Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center is not supported for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications)

AMD Eyefinity 2.1 technology enhancements

• Custom resolutions – users can now choose from a much larger set of display resolutions for their AMD Eyefinity configurations
• Dynamic Configuration Changes: Switching between different display configurations (when physically plugging/un-plugging displays) will occur automatically by loading the appropriate profile
• HydraVision enhancements: The Windows Task bar can now be moved and resized based on users preference
• Profile Manager improvements: Users can now create multiple Display profiles, enabling users to seamlessly switch between various AMD Eyefinity and Display Configurations

The AMD Catalyst™ 12.2 pre-certified driver is available for download here.

New AMD Catalyst™ Application Profile is now available:

This release of AMD Catalyst™ Application Profile (Catalyst 12.1 CAP3) includes the following updates

• Alan Wake:  Improves CrossFire performance
• Syndicate: Improves both single GPU and CrossFire performance
• Darkness 2: Improves CrossFire performance
• Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning: Improves CrossFire performance for the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series to avoid negative scaling at low resolutions
• Natural Selection 2: Fixes shadow map flickering issue seen with CrossFire enabled

The new AMD Catalyst Application Profile is available for download here.

The critically acclaimed and BAFTA nominated, TIME magazine Game of the Year Alan Wake, finally comes to PC! From Remedy, the creators of Max Payne arrives a heart pounding Psychological Action Thriller, further refined and enhanced for the PC. The game comes with two special episodes, The Signal and The Writer.

When the wife of the best-selling writer Alan Wake disappears on their vacation, his search turns up pages from a thriller he doesn’t even remember writing. A Dark Presence stalks the small town of Bright Falls, pushing Wake to the brink of sanity in his fight to unravel the mystery and save his love.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSGPU3FnD8Q

Presented in the style of a TV series, Alan Wake features the trademark Remedy storytelling and pulse-pounding action sequences. As players dive deeper and deeper into the mystery, they’ll face overwhelming odds, plot twists, and cliffhangers. It’s only by mastering the Fight With Light combat mechanic that they can stay one step ahead of the darkness that spreads across Bright Falls.

With the body of an action game and the mind of a psychological thriller, Alan Wake’s intense atmosphere, deep and multilayered story, and exceptionally tense combat sequences provide players with an entertaining and original gaming experience.

Features:

• Includes Alan Wake Special Episodes “The Signal” and “The Writer”
• Experience Alan Wake’s Pacific Northwest in higher resolutions and higher fidelity than the Xbox360 version.
• Fully configurable mouse and keyboard support, or if you prefer to play with the Microsoft gamepad connected to your PC, you can do that too!
• Lots of customizable graphics settings and support for 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios!
• Multithreaded engine that takes advantage of quad core CPUs.
• Additional features our fans have sought after such as field of view adjustment as well as “hide HUD”.
• Supports AMD Eyefinity technology for 3X1

Official Website: AlanWake.com

Alan Wake is a registered trademark of Remedy Entertainment Ltd.

Power efficiency is a critical performance metric for our discrete graphics products.  This should come as no surprise for those who follow the overall industry trends: Consumers are more aware of the impact their product choices make on the environment; products in the industry are moving toward thinner and lighter form factors; and rising energy costs can significantly impact the cost of ownership of new PC products.  The net result is that consumers  value energy efficient products across the board.

Someone with a more traditional view of the enthusiast graphics market might think that the highest end graphics products are isolated or exempt from these trends and driven only by the need for higher peak performance.  In reality, this is certainly not the case.  At AMD, our focus on power efficiency via thin-and-light capable products designed to run on battery power has actually helped result in more power efficient products across the stack; particularly in our enthusiast products which have enjoyed major performance improvements alongside major efficiency improvements.

In recent years, AMD has proven itself to be a leader in power efficiency with the introduction of technologies such as PowerPlay™  and AMD PowerTune technologies¹.  These features  are fast becoming must-haves because of how strongly end users value power efficiency.

Most recently, AMD has further demonstrated its leadership in this field with the introduction of the AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 series graphics cards which feature a new bleeding edge and revolutionary capability known as AMD ZeroCore Power Technology¹.   AMD ZeroCore  Power technology is a game changer which cuts long idle power down to a small fraction of what was previously achievable; which is something we know that our enthusiast audience will truly appreciate.

So how does it work?

When GPUs aren’t tasked with heavy graphics or compute workloads, they are intelligently managed to power down to their minimum working states through a number of techniques such as engine/memory clock reductions, reduced voltages and power gating.   This works to minimize power during static screen and other very low workloads where graphics cards can idle at less than  their peak power.

However, in the long idle state – where the display is blanked but the rest of the system remains in an active power state – AMD ZeroCore Power technology takes GPU efficiency to a whole new level.  When systems enter the long idle state and applications are not using background GPU resources, AMD ZeroCore power technology  powers down all major functional blocks of the discrete GPU and reduces overall chip power consumption to well under one Watt.  And while core GPU blocks (such as the compute units, display blocks, video engines and memory interfaces) are  shut down and consuming zero power, the rest of the system is still available to do what it needs to do.  So if you leave your PC on to share/stream/serve content, to simplify remote access or to simply make sure it’s ready to go at the flick of a mouse, AMD ZeroCore Power technology makes it happen with near-zero graphics power.

For the ultra-enthusiast, AMD ZeroCore Power technology takes things a step further to enable scalable power savings:  With AMD CrossFire™ technology, the additional GPUs are always held in the AMD ZeroCore Power state when they’re not in use.  This means that AMD CrossFire™ users can scale up their performance with negligible idle power increases and no acoustic penalties.

As you can see, ZeroCore Power is a huge leap forward for AMD in delivering low power and high efficiency graphics. And given it took us less than one year to morph this innovation from a notebook GPU hardware capability to a groundbreaking capability for the desktop AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 series, it’s innovation we can all get excited about!

–

1. AMD PowerPlay™, AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power are technologies offered by certain AMD Radeon™ products, which are designed to intelligently manage GPU power consumption in response to certain GPU load conditions. Not all products feature all technologies – check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities.

Korhan Erenben is the Manager of Technical Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.1 driver:

AMD HD3D technology support enhancement

• Enables support for AMD HD3D technology in conjunction with AMD CrossFireX configurations
• Delivers a new Stereo 3D mode over HDMI 1.4a connections – 1080p at 30Hz is now enabled on supported displays.

AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements – Application Profiles

• AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver enables users to create per application profiles to individually control 3D and CrossFireX settings for Direct3D applications
• Please be sure to select the “Restore Factory Defaults” option under the Catalyst Control Center Preferences menu before using the new application profiles feature – this ensures there are no compatibility issues between previous drivers and the new AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver with regards to application profiles

AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements – Video UI improvements

• AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver includes user interface enhancements to simply adjustment of video color and video quality controls

This release of AMD Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems

• SLED 11 SP2 early look support
• Ubuntu 11.10 production level support

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.2 driver:

AMD Eyefinity 2.1 technology enhancements

• Additional resolution support: Users can now choose from a larger set of resolutions when running AMD Eyefinity
• Dynamic Configuration Changes: Switching between different display configurations will occur automatically when physically plugging/un-plugging displays
• HydraVision enhancements: The Windows Task bar can now be moved and resized based on users preference
• Profile Manager improvements: Increased support for Display Groups (including 5×1) and Extended configurations within the Profile Manager

In initial testing of the upcoming Windows 8 operating system, we’ve seen performance improvements of up to 10% in some applications, when compared to Windows 7. This is because the system correctly recognizes the AMD FX processor architecture and cores. Thanks to close collaboration between Microsoft and AMD, Microsoft recently completed back-porting some of the Windows 8 scheduler code for AMD FX processors into a hotfix for Windows 7.

So if you have an AMD FX processor, here’s what you can do to update your version of Windows 7:

1)    Download the scheduler update (KB2645594) and install.  This will tell the scheduler that your AMD FX processor contains dual-core modules (in fact this is similar to the SMT path that the other guys use). In essence, threads 1-4 now get assigned to their own module first.

2)    Download the core parking scheduler update (KB2646060) and install.  This will prevent Windows 7 shutting down unused cores prematurely when there are threads to be assigned (there’s a performance penalty parking and then un-parking a core).

The best possible cases for improvement are applications that use 1-2 cores in your AMD FX processor. In our testing using the AMD FX-8150 processor, we found the best improvement in wPrime, Left 4 Dead 2, and Lost Planet. Below you’ll find links to the patches:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2646060

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594

Our testing shows that not every application realizes a performance boost. In fact, heavily threaded apps (those designed to use all 8 cores), get little or no uplift from this hotfix – they are already maxing out the processor.  In other cases, the uplift averages out to a 1-2 percent uplift. But heck, it is free performance, and this is the scheduler model that will be used in Windows 8 (along with some further enhancements), so why not add it to your list of downloads?

If you have an AMD FX processor, head over to Microsoft and grab the free updates.

Adam Kozak is a product marketing manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

About six months ago [H]ardOCP hosted a day of gaming for enthusiast in Dallas, Texas. I was fortunate enough to attend that event and was blown away with the raw energy in the room. Kyle Bennett of [H]ardOCP was the host for the day and members of his community were playing games, winning prizes and having a blast. And the 400 gamers that came to play that day left wanting more.

Never ones to disappoint, Kyle and I immediately started talking about the next – bigger and better – event.

Fast forward to January 21, 2012…

[H]ardOCP invites you to the AMD FX GamExperience in Dallas, Texas at Eddie Deen’s Ranch. This free event is open to all gamers (from starters to pros) and will run from 10am-6pm.  Kyle from [H]ardOCP will be the host and I’ll be there representing AMD, the Platinum sponsor of the event.  We’ll have tournaments, demo stations, breakout sessions, and a lot of giveaways and surprises. The event co-sponsors will be:

• Antec
• ArcSoft
• ASrock
• Astro Gaming
• ASUS
• Corsair
• Diamond
• Ergotech
• Gigabyte
• Magix
• Maingear
• MSI
• Optoma
• Patriot
• Sapphire
• vReveal
• Western Digital
• Zotac
• Fatal1ty

.

You bring your friends and your game face. All you need to do is register here.

Get the scoop on the event details on Facebook and Twitter at @FXGamexperience, @AMD_Unprocessed and @hardocp.

Terry Makedon is the Manager of Software Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. 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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZlWAhArzyo

Features:

• Free-to-play, designed exclusively for the PC
• DirectX® 11 optimized
• Developed on Unreal Engine 3
• Futuristic gun-battles
• Rocket-powered mech suits
• Experience and Currency system
• Upgrade skills, and buy new weapons and gear
• Fully customizable weapons, load outs, and characters

Read our Q&A with Zombie Studios on the implementation of DirectX® 11, and view the video above to see the direct impact it’s having on the game. For more information, check out www.playblacklight.com to register for the upcoming beta.

Designed and developed by Zombie Studios, Inc. www.zombie.com Blacklight, Zombie, and Zombie Studios are trademarks or registered trademarks of Zombie Studios, Inc.

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 represents a fundamental evolution in the graphics industry, being the first and only GPU based on 28nm process technology. With the introduction of our Graphics Core Next Architecture (GCN), the AMD Radeon HD 7970 allows gamers to experience unprecedented game performance. To take advantage of upcoming game titles and leverage the capabilities of our new GCN Architecture, we brought the AMD Radeon HD 7970 to market with full support for PCI Express 3.0, offering world-class performance scaling to our enthusiast community running the latest platforms. But we didn’t stop there.

Continuing to lead in multi-display technology has always been important to our customers and subsequently, important to us. Bearing this in mind, we’ve worked tirelessly to improve multi-display support with every product launch and AMD Catalyst™ driver release. With the launch of the AMD Radeon HD 7970, we bring AMD Eyefinity 2.0 technology to our customers with support for stereo 3D, universal bezel compensation, brand new display configurations and an expanded and more immersive field of view. Customers with 2560×1600 monitors in an AMD Eyefinity 5×1 landscape configuration can now achieve a surface resolution of 12,800 x 8000, driving more than 20 million pixels of screen real estate!

We’re plugged in and are in constant communication with our enthusiast community and industry pros and some feedback we received involved power management. For example, gamers asked for enhanced power management features for their graphics card. We answered, and introduced AMD PowerTune technology in the AMD Radeon™ HD 6900 series. With the AMD Radeon HD 7970, we refined AMD PowerTune technology and introduced enhanced power containment. This automatically adjusts GPU power draw by dynamically controlling clock speeds, allowing gamers advanced performance inside of the power envelope they specify. But we didn’t stop there. We then took power management one step further and developed ZeroCore Power technology and brought it to the AMD Radeon HD 7970. AMD ZeroCore Power technology is a sophisticated power management solution that allows our GPUs to idle at roughlu 1/20^th the power draw of previous generation products.

All of the above would be incomplete without our Accelerated Parallel Processing (App) technology. On the AMD Radeon HD 7970, enthusiasts will enjoy improved GPGPU performance, enhanced video quality features through the AMD HD Media Accelerator allowing users to upscale the hottest Blu-ray movies, online video and other HD content beyond 1080p resolution. With full 3D stereoscopic decode, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 supports the latest 3D movies.

Bringing the world’s fastest single-GPU graphics card to desktop PCs everywhere is no easy feat. It’s a culmination of many months, even years, of learning, planning and testing, involving multiple teams in locations across the globe. The launch of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 shows that once again, we are aggressively advancing the state of the graphics hardware industry – this time with the arrival of the world’s first 28nm GPU. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is now the world’s most advanced graphics card. Simply put: we never settle.

Matt Skynner is the corporate vice president and general manager, GPU Division, AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1LXuEH53DI

Features:

• The Jagged Alliance series achieved numerous awards and is considered to date as milestone in the genre of real time strategy
• Unrivaled mix of combat (tactics), roleplay, business and strategy
• Innovative “Plan & Go” combat system combines RTS gameplay with turn-based elements
• Liberate a fictitious island from a dictator
• Realistic war setting with authentic-looking firearms
• Laptop/computer menu as a central anchor point for the player
• Assemble your own unit of mercenaries from over 60 unique mercenaries
• Simultaneous control of multiple squads using a strategic map
• Every mercenary has a detailed set of likes, dislikes, strengths and weaknesses
• Convincing characters who interact with and comment on the game events
• All the dialog has audio
• Train your mercenaries to improve their effectiveness
• Acquire resources by capturing mines and encampments
• AMD Eyefinity technology support for 3X1

Screenshots:

Official Website

Developed by: Coreplay GmbH
Published by: bitComposer Games and Kalypso

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 11.12 driver:

AMD OpenGL 4.2 production support

• AMD Catalyst 11.12 delivers official support for the OpenGL 4.2 specification

AMD Eyefinity technology enhancements

• Enables support for AMD HD3D technology when using a 3×1 Landscape Eyefinity display group, on supported DisplayPort 3D monitors.

AMD Vision Engine Control Center enhancements for Dual Graphics

• Improvements have been implemented to better facilitate the enabling and control of the Dual Graphics within the Vision Engine Control Center

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 11.12 Linux driver:
This release of AMD Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems

• RHEL 6.2 early look support

AMD’s driver for the Windows 8 Developer build is also now available on www.amd.com for download.   This is the same driver that was made available through Windows Update when the Windows 8 Preview Build was released in September 2011.  AMD plans to release new drivers for Windows 8 on www.amd.com the same day as all future Windows 8 milestone releases (Beta, RC, RTM) – just as AMD did for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.1 driver:

AMD HD3D technology support enhancement

• Enables support for AMD HD3D technology in conjunction with AMD CrossFireX configurations
• Delivers a new Stereo 3D mode over HDMI 1.4a connections – 1080p at 30Hz is now enabled on supported displays.

AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements – Application Profiles

• AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver enables users to create per application profiles to individually control 3D and CrossFireX settings for Direct3D applications
• Please be sure to select the “Restore Factory Defaults” option under the Catalyst Control Center Preferences menu before using the new application profiles feature – this ensures there are no compatibility issues between previous drivers and the new AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver with regards to application profiles.

AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements – Video UI improvements

• AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver includes user interface enhancements to simply adjustment of video color and video quality controls

Performance highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.1 Preview driver (in addition to the AMD Catalyst 11.11c performance driver)

• Improves performance (10-15%) in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim when Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing is enabled on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6900 Series for single GPU and AMD CrossFire configurations

David Doel is on the marketing team at AMD Gaming Evolved. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.