What's New: AMD's Catalyst 10.2 & 10.3 Drivers
by Ryan Smith on February 16, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
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 3rd 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 3rd parties to get in if they want to.
The big change here is that they’re going to provide driver hooks for 3rd 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 3rd 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.
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anactoraaron - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
yeah "fast and versitile control panel" that doesn't include any overclocking option. And why is that again? Oh yeah, Nvidia cards these days (provided you acutally are getting "new" technology and not a rebrand) run HOT. And looking at load temps/power usage from any other article on this fine website will show proof of that. OC with them with no water cool and you are asking for trouble. And don't even get me started with all of the issues with nTune... I lost count of all the times nTune crashed my pc with my 8800...leexgx - Thursday, February 18, 2010 - link
stop useing caps (please press report post to remove users post like this)bim27142 - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
man, chill... if you don't want CCC, then just download the drive only and then get yourself some other softwares (say ATI Tray Tools perhaps?)cheinonen - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
I'm just glad they will finally have monthly drivers for my wife's laptop so I'm not at the mercy of HP deciding they want to support it. Her machine can't do full screen Flash with the CPU only, and HP has refused to release an updated driver with Flash 10.1 acceleration support, even though they could, so hopefully by next month she'll be watching Hulu on her laptop full screen.RaynorWolfcastle - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
While all this is great, I think ATI should instead focus on fixing the grey screen bug that shows up on Win7 x64. My 5770 is all but unusable because it crashes every 30 mins while I'm browsing the web. Unfortunately, this issue is not a bad card but a widespread issue with the current drivers that affects several brands and models. Google "grey screen of death" to see what I mean.So AMD, how about we start with the basics, and get your cards to work without crashing instead of these new features?
heymrdj - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Now if only drivers would get rid of this random problem..FXi - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
If AMD manages to get mobile drivers out this could be doom for Nvidia in the mobile space.DX11 (judging by Nvidia's silence on the mobile DX11 topic) is apparently not within Nvidia's capability this year. It's not even on the roadmaps. Fermi is big and hot, not mobile. Now mind you, AMD has been "talking" mobile drivers for a year and has yet to deliver, so there is that weakness to this. But if AMD is DX11, and the only mobile DX11 solution, with drivers on top of that, Nvidia can wave bye bye to all their mid to high end GPU solutions for laptops.
To top it off AMD's mobile solutions are all 40nm, so they are lower power than Nvidia's high end mobile solutions.
If Nvidia has a flag to wave, they had better wave it soon. The DX11 mobile parts are here. Drivers come in 30 days. And the marketshare shift comes after that. That spells doom and gloom for Nvidia's sales.
Ramon Zarat - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
Very nice article.Despite the fact that I recognize ATI tremendous progression on the driver front in recent years, in many respects, they are unfortunately still behind Nvidia.
On the other hand, they definitively have the current hardware market lead and momentum. And to be honest, their drivers have not been this close to Nvidia, ever. So close, but still so far at he same time...
To really take the longterm control of the GPU market, they must pull all the stops and take the lead from Nvidia within the next 10 months. Once you have missed this windows of opportunity, it's too late. ATI have proven they can execute flawlessly on the hardware level with the impressive roll-out of the 5000 series. Now they need to do the same of the software side of the equation.
In the mid-term, GPGPU, or more to the point OpenCL, will become much more than just the niche market CUDA is right now, more or less confined to the role of marking bragging rights and branding technological statement. It will soon become, if not already the case, a major purchasing decision factor.
Just like Adobe flash, despite currently being based on Microsoft proprietary DXVA2, more and more apps will become GPGPU aware. Logically, sooner than later, every applications will take advantage of it simply because of the decisive market edge it will provide. Anything that don't will instantly become obsolete. That mean all and every applications requiring more juice than Microsoft calculator or Solitaire...
2011 is shaping up to be the Opencl year and as such, a significant turning point in the overall computing balance of power. ATI can't afford to miss that boat and must in fact imperatively be ahead of that game. That's crucial for them as for the AMD's branch fusion platform. Integration and convergence will be more prevalent than ever.
There are much more things to do than just OpenCl, but in my opinion, that should be priority number one. The fact they are so behind in that department is obvious if you compare Stream with Cuda market penetration, drivers maturity, OpenCL SDK and their overall strategy. Add to this the need to be ahead 10 months from now means only one thing: MAJOR R&D spending and hire A LOT of software engineers!
Anything less would qualify as a monumental missed opportunity as such fundamental transitive market vectors (GPGPU and OpenCL) are a very rare occurrence in the computing technological evolution cycle. It's not everyday that a technology goes from a totally exclusive vertical gaming centric focus to a complete horizontal, general purpose capable device delivering, in a variety of applications, 30 to 100% processing speed acceleration, and in some situations a lot more than that compare to CPU alone!
In fact, I can't even remember anything close the near-paradigm of the current situation since the inception of electronic digital computing device with the introduction, in 1937, of the Atanasoff–Berry computer. In all that time, we have witnessed many incredible innovations and actual real paradigms shift, but as far as I know, nothing like this transmutation of an existing technology. It's like the GPU went from the confine of its larva state to finally hatch and achieve its full GPGPU potential! OpenCL is the mean to open that floodgate. That's why it's so important ATI make this happen, fast.
Ramon
R3MF - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
I want it AMD, and it want it installed by default in the catalyst driver.tntomek - Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - link
The 5000 series mobile GPU adoption is seriously hurting. Dell has nothing, HP only has the envy which is great if only if were available in Canada/UK for less than $2199And what really is the point of i5 if I can't switch and run on Intel graphics when I'm working in Word, doesn't have to be pretty and automatic just give me the option if even via reboot or logout. No need for slow notebook and sweaty palms in 2010.