AMD Working on New Catalyst Omega Drivers

[WYP]

AMD are rumored to be working on "special edition" catalyst Omega Drivers, which will offer AMD users more features, performance optimizations and quality improvements to the drivers.

Read more on AMD's Rumoured Catalyst Omega Drivers.

 

[Kushiro]

Go team red

 

[Doomslayer]

Hopefully it doesn't take 6-12 months to come out ^_^

 

[ImprovizoR]

Well they said that this was going to be a yearly thing so I expect these by the end of the year.

 

[Wraith]

Oooh when I saw Omega Drivers I thought of Omegadrivers.net I always used their 3rd party AMD/ATI drivers they were leaps ahead in optimisation.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Hopefully it doesn't take 6-12 months to come out ^_^

If you read the article it says it'll release sometime next month

AMD as of late have been very good with there normal drivers. Hopefully they can get the Omega drivers coming more often than yearly. Would be great to see some every 3-4 months and in between have about a monthly normal driver update. Would help change people's perception about AMDs drivers even though they are on par with Nvidia(as of late probably better)

 

[Oseth]

If you read the article it says it'll release sometime next month

AMD as of late have been very good with there normal drivers. Hopefully they can get the Omega drivers coming more often than yearly. Would be great to see some every 3-4 months and in between have about a monthly normal driver update. Would help change people's perception about AMDs drivers even though they are on par with Nvidia(as of late probably better)

Excellent point. I used to stay away from AMD cards because of their poor driver support but as of late I have become more lenient and noticed that the newer drivers are just as stable as nVidia's.

 

[DarthDudo]

Excellent point. I used to stay away from AMD cards because of their poor driver support but as of late I have become more lenient and noticed that the newer drivers are just as stable as nVidia's.

Most of Nvidia's drivers lately have been terrible, crashes when browsing the net, random driver crashes at even stock clocks etc not stable at all, on the latest driver, 358.50, I was getting consistent driver crashes in the Witcher 3 and even much older games.

 

[WYP]

Hopefully AMD will be able to make another big leap with their drivers as they definitely need every positive they can get given their financial situation.

AMD really need to change their situation by this time next year, if Zen doesn't do well and the GPU side fails to go toe to toe with Nvidia it may be the beginning of the end for them.

A strong AMD is good for the market, as it will keep Intel and Nvidia working hard. Those guys don't need a reason to relax.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Excellent point. I used to stay away from AMD cards because of their poor driver support but as of late I have become more lenient and noticed that the newer drivers are just as stable as nVidia's.

It's been that way ever since the 11.12 drivers back in 2011. Ever since they got the actual GCN optimized driver out they have done very very well. Beforehand while they weren't buggy or anything they didn't really give much performance gains.

Hopefully AMD will be able to make another big leap with their drivers as they definitely need every positive they can get given their financial situation.

AMD really need to change their situation by this time next year, if Zen doesn't do well and the GPU side fails to go toe to toe with Nvidia it may be the beginning of the end for them.

A strong AMD is good for the market, as it will keep Intel and Nvidia working hard. Those guys don't need a reason to relax.

I'm sure they will do fine. If anything now that they created a subsection of the GPU side of the company, they can always spin it off and sell the rest and still be here as a GPU/SoC company.

 

[barnsley]

Crossfire still has a long way to go to be on par with SLI. If they can fix that then I'm sure they'll be on par with nVidia driverwise now (or better if you include older cards, such as the 280X). Releasing 'special edition' drivers irregularly won't improve things though. Solid regular updates> Special yearly drivers.

 

[Type-8]

Crossfire still has a long way to go to be on par with SLI. If they can fix that then I'm sure they'll be on par with nVidia driverwise now (or better if you include older cards, such as the 280X). Releasing 'special edition' drivers irregularly won't improve things though. Solid regular updates> Special yearly drivers.

Everything I've always seen has tended to show better scaling in Crossfire than SLI. From a stability viewpoint SLI might be ahead, but one could hardly call SLI or Crossfire stable compared to running a single card. Plus modern AMD cards don't even need a bridge to Crossfire. Is there something I'm missing?

 

[AlienALX]

Everything I've always seen has tended to show better scaling in Crossfire than SLI. From a stability viewpoint SLI might be ahead, but one could hardly call SLI or Crossfire stable compared to running a single card. Plus modern AMD cards don't even need a bridge to Crossfire. Is there something I'm missing?

It's only about scaling when it works, though. And SLI usually works more often than Crossfire.

Plus there's the fact that Nvidia have built hardware into their cards specifically for SLI that makes them better (and why they never got caught with their pants round their ankles like AMD).

When Crossfire works though? sure, you tend to get much higher performance

 

[barnsley]

Everything I've always seen has tended to show better scaling in Crossfire than SLI. From a stability viewpoint SLI might be ahead, but one could hardly call SLI or Crossfire stable compared to running a single card. Plus modern AMD cards don't even need a bridge to Crossfire. Is there something I'm missing?

Crossfire support for games isn't as common as SLI support and in terms of stability SLI is still much better (although they have made really good gains with Crossfire recently). AMD arguably (at the moment) make better options for dual cards solutions, its just the software side of things isn't as good yet.

Compared to the HD7970 days AMD are pretty much a different company now driver wise. It does help that nVidia have been a bit lazy recently though..