What's New: AMD's Catalyst 10.2 & 10.3 Drivers

10.3: Stereo Driver Hooks & Final Thoughts

The last feature making its appearance in next month’s Catalyst 10.3 drivers will be the inclusion of some underlying hooks in the drivers for 3^rd party 3D display hardware. AMD hasn’t been completely ignoring NVIDIA’s success with 3DVision, and while they’re not getting directly in to the 3D arena like NVIDIA has, they’re going to be providing the tools for 3^rd parties to get in if they want to.

The big change here is that they’re going to provide driver hooks for 3^rd party products to use to improve and simplify the operation of those products. One example AMD is throwing out is that their drivers will now be able to do quad buffering so that 3D products can double-buffer each eye separately. These hooks will also allow the hardware to output stereo images at 120Hz similar to how NVIDIA implements 3DVision, so that each eye can be offered images at 60Hz without needing to use a more esoteric solution such as iZ3D’s double-DVI setup.

Our expectation here is that with these new hooks a 3^rd party will offer a 3DVision-like kit utilizing shutter glasses and a 120Hz monitor, although the quad buffer changes in particular are rather generic and can be used (not to mention necessary ) for any other form of 3D technology that takes off. Nothing has been announced yet, but it’s likely only a matter of time.

Final Thoughts

Although AMD is always working on the Catalyst drivers, major updates tend to come in spurts and this is a prime example of that case. With the 10.2 and 10.3 releases we are seeing the first post-launch driver drop for the Radeon 5000 series. Some of the things we’re seeing today such as Catalyst profiles and fully-functional Ultra Low Power State are things we would have liked to see at the 5000 series launch, while other things such as the new Eyefinity tweaks are going to be a nice addition to the existing capabilities of the hardware.

For the Catalyst profiles and Mobility driver support in particular, it’s going to be worth keeping an eye on how well AMD does in implementing these things. Profile support is simply a matter of being timely with new game releases, although we’re still going to ask for the ability to write our own profiles anyhow. As for the Mobility driver program, moving from an opt-in to an opt-out model should prove to make the program much more successful than AMD’s previous effort, but the one remaining wildcard is what OEMs have opted-out of the program, and with what products. AMD is only expecting business products to be opted-out, but as far as we know, any OEM can opt-out for any reason, so there’s still a remote chance of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

There’s also one thing we were hoping to see in the 10.2/10.3 drivers which has not come to pass, and that’s OpenCL support. AMD is continuing to only provide OpenCL runtime functionality through the installation of the Stream SDK, which means even though AMD’s 4000 and 5000 series hardware is capable of OpenCL, none of those cards can run those programs out of the box. AMD’s current reason is that they don’t want to expand the size of their drivers any further (they’re currently 123MB for the 10.3 betas) which is a valid concern looking at the size of their OpenCL runtime, but at the same time we can’t imagine this is good for OpenCL adoption in the long-run.

Who is going to develop applications using OpenCL if half your user base (not counting Intel IGP users) can’t run your application out of the box? Even worse, you currently need to sign up for an AMD Developer Central account before you can download the Stream SDK in order to get the runtime - and what user is going to do that? NVIDIA is way ahead of AMD here, having shipped OpenCL support in their drivers for several months now, and they’ve been able to do so while keeping their drivers at about the same size as AMD’s (let’s not forget the PhysX runtime either). Unless AMD expects everyone to go the DirectCompute route (in which case we can kiss cross-platform GPGPU usage goodbye) AMD’s GPGPU efforts are currently stuck in place.

Finally, from a testing perspective the 10.3 drivers are still in beta, but much like the Catalyst 9.12 hotfix was to the 10.2 driver launching today, the 10.3 driver set we’re working with has been shaping up rather well. AMD hasn’t told us when they’ll be launching besides the fact that it will be in March, but based on the drivers we’re seeing we wouldn’t be surprised if it was an early launch rather than a mid-month or later launch as AMD is common for AMD.