AMD Releases Catalyst 11.1a Hot-fix Drivers

AMD released the latest version of the Catalyst Drivers - the Catalyst 11.1a Hot-fix drivers - yesterday, which was exactly when they said they would. The new drivers feature bug fixes, performance improvements and a few new features.

The fight back

Firstly the drivers promise some pretty impressive performance improvements. Whether they actually do perform that well is still something to be seen but for what it’s worth, here’s the list:

• 3DMark Vantage improves ~7%
• 3DMark06 improves ~3%
• Call of Duty Black Ops improves ~20% at 4xMSAA and up to 35% at 8xMSAA
• Riddick Assault on Dark Athena SSAO performance improves ~20%
• Unigine Heaven OpenGL performance improves ~10% at moderate, 30% at normal and 100% at extreme tessellation levels
• Aliens vs. Predators improves ~9% at 2xMSAA and up to 20% at 4xMSAA
• Batman Arkham Asylum improves ~4%
• Crysis Warhead improves ~2-4%
• Metro 2033 improves ~28% at 4xMSAA

Aside from this, the version also has an early prototype of AMD’s tessellation controls and supports OpenGL 4.1. Anyway, this release will hopefully increase the AMD cards’ performance enough to battle with NVIDIA’s formidable lineup of the GTX 580, the GTX 570 and the GTX 560 Ti, which was only launched yesterday.

Anyway, you can download the drivers here.