New AMD Catalyst 10.6 Drivers Improve Video Playback, Gaming Performance
AMD is poised to release a new Catalyst drive package, v10.6, that incorporates a number of new features and performance enhancements. While there are a handful of game-specific performance enhancements, it's the new video-related features that are potentially the most interesting. GPU acceleration of H.264 video content using Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Video De-blocking support Mosquito noise reduction Official support for OpenGL 4.0 and OpenGL 3.3 Some older revisions of AMD's Catalyst driver suite supported GPU acceleration of H.264 video using the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta as well, to offload video processing to the GPU, but this new release also offers enhanced playback quality when video post-processing features are enabled. On a related note, a number of new features have also been incorporated into the drivers that enhance the image quality of HD video. With the Catalyst 10.6 driver release, most Radeon HD 5000 series cards will offer improved cadence detection and dynamic contrast, and skin tone correction, in addition to new video post-processing features which include Mosquito Noise Reduction and Deblocking of compression artifacts. Both cards offered excellent performance in the benchmark (a perfect score is 210), but the Radeon HD 5850 came out on top, thanks mostly it the Radeon's superior performance in the Upscaled Compression Artifacts and Skin Tone Correction tests. Although, like earlier versions of this benchmark, we suspect future driver updates from all of the major players are likely to level the playing field somewhat. We should note, however, that a particular GPU's performance in HQV 2.0 is partially determined by its compute performance, because some of the enhancement algorithms uses the GPU's stream processors. That means, lower-end discrete GPU with fewer stream processors won't be able to churn through as much data as a higher-end part. And the same goes for IGPs. 3DMark Vantage Batman: Arkham Asylum Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 Benchmark Company of Heroes – DX10 Crysis Warhead DiRT 2 – DX9 The Chronicles of Riddick - Assault on Dark Athena Unigine Tropics World in Conflict Wolfenstein The Catalyst 10.6 drivers should be posted on AMD.com very soon, if they're not available already, should you want to check them out for yourselves.
Here is a breakdown of the new features available in the Catalyst 10.6 display driver release, snapped directly from the release notes:
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To assess how these new features affect the image quality of SD and HD video, we fired up the latest version of the HQV benchmark (v2.0) and compared the performance of an ATI Radeon HD 5850 to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470.
To obtain the scores you see here, we had to manually adjust a few settings in both AMD's and NVIDIA's driver control panels, namely those related to noise reduction, to increase the amount of reduction performed on each scene. We're told, however, that the optimized settings will be default in the next Catalyst drive release.
Gaming Improvements
We're sure many of you would like to know which gaming titles are improved with the Catalyst 10.6 drivers as well, so we've ripped that data from the release notes as well. According to AMD, the following performance gains are offered with the Catalyst 10.6 drivers:
