AMD releases Catalyst 13.8 beta, promises to fix Crossfire micro stutter

AMD has released a beta of their latest Catalyst-drivers: Catalyst 13.8 Beta. One of the big fixes in this driver is that AMD has added frame-pacing to help get rid of or at least minimize the micro-stuttering a lot of people have experienced when running more than one GPU.

So what is frame pacing? AMD has had a problem where when using multiple GPU’s the frames has not come in an even pace, instead sometimes the next frame has come a bit to late meaning it is shown a very short time before next frame comes. This is what gives the impression of “micro stutter”.

AMD has been working for some months now to address this situation and todays beta-driver is the first step in solving this issue. Anandtech did a great quick analysis of the drivers and found that it indeed has helped a lot. It still is some way of compared to a single GPU but it still is a huge improvement over previous drivers.

In these drivers the frame pacing is present for DX10 and DX11-games up to 2560 x 1600 but AMD will add support for higher resolutions and DX9-games in later drivers. 

In addition to the frame pacing-fix AMD also has added OpenGL 4.3-support and some updates for those using the Enduro-feature on mobile chips.

AMD-owners, feel free to tell us in our forum or in the comments how you feel these drivers work.

Get the Windows Catalyst 13.8 Beta-drivers from AMD
Get the Linux Catalyst 13.8 Beta-drivers from AMD

OpenGL 4.3 support – full support for the OpenGL 4.3 feature set

·         Performance improvements found in AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta:

o   Metro Last Light – Improves performance up to 7% on the AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series

·         OpenGL support for User Profiles and Catalyst Application Profiles:

o   Users can now create per application 3D setting profiles for OpenGL applications

o   OpenGL applications are now supported through Catalyst Application Profile updates (for single GPU and AMD CrossFire configurations)

·         AMD Enduro Technology enhancement – The  AMD Catalyst Control Center  now shows which applications are active on the Performance GPU and the Power saving GPU