AMD has announced a new driver for its GPUs and APUs that challenges Nvidia technologies.
Replacing Catalyst 14.9, the Catalyst Omega driver is said to raise GPU performance by up to 19% on high-end GPUs and 29% on APUs, when used with newer games such as Bioshock Infinite. New features are also included, such as Virtual Super Resolution (VSR); this is similar to Nvidia’s Dynamic Super Resolution. Both technologies upscale content to UltraHD and then down-sample to the monitor’s resolution, bypassing the need for anti-aliasing. Another new feature is ‘Fluid Motion’; an anti-judder feature using interpolation; and Contour Removal, said to eliminate compression artefacts without affecting detail.
Freesync and Alienware Graphics Amplifier support have been added with the update, as well as Mantle game capture, OpenCL 2.0 and TressFX Hair 3.0. Additionally, 5k monitors are now supported.
An official launch date has not been shared.
