AMD has pulled out quite a surprise from its sleeve by releasing its new Catalyst Omega graphics driver with plenty of new changes, performance improvements, bug fixes and new features.


The list of new features in the Catalyst Omega driver start off with the Virtual Super Resolution, or the VSR. Back when Nvidia launched its Maxwell-based GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards, it also launched a new feature called the DSR, and today, AMD has unveiled a pretty much the same thing under a different name. The Virtual Super Resolution renders games at higher resolution than your screen and scale them down to the resolution of the screen, which should in the end result in better looking quality but at a rather big performance hit, of course.




The next in line is the FreeSync, a project that AMD announced a while back and while FreeSync-enabled monitors are still not available, at least the feature is now officially announced and launched with the new Catalyst Omega drivers. In case you are wondering FreeSync-enabled monitors are expected in Q1 2015, and this is pretty much the same deal as Nvidia's G-Sync, and should remove stuttering and tearing in games.




In addition to these, AMD has also introduced the new 24-display Eyefinity with Catalyst Omega driver release. This one is practically self-explanatory as now, you can support up to 24 displays on 4 GPUs on Windows. It offers updated GUI and should be quite easy to use.




The new AMD Catalyst Omega driver also brings 5K monitor support, something that AMD brought specifically for the well known Dell 5K UP2715K monitor which was announced earlier. The new Catalyst Omega driver now support 5120x2880 resolution at 60Hz via two DisplayPort 1.2 outputs.




The new Catalyst Omega driver also brings plenty of video playback enhancements including number of new algorithms that should provide smoother video playback, reduce judder, remove compression artifacts as well as bring 1080p detail enhancements and a couple of other features.




The new driver also brings a new version of the Gaming Evolved client which has Mantle API support and video editor.




When it comes to general improvements and performance improvements, the new AMD Catalyst Omega driver brings new frame pacing improvements for Dual-Graphics and Crossfire configurations in games like Batman: Arkham Origins, Tomb Raider, Sniper Elite 3 and Metro. When it comes to performance improvements, the list is not that impressive but does include performance improvements of up to 19 percent in Bioshock Infinite, up to 11 percent in Call of Duty: Ghosts, up to 9 percent in Rome 2: Total War and Sniper Elite 3, up to 8 percent in Grid 2 and up to 10 percent in Batman: Arkham Origins game. There are also several performance improvements ranging from 5 to 29 percent when the new Catalyst Omega driver is used on AMD APUs.

The AMD Catalyst Omega graphics driver is probably the biggest AMD Catalyst driver update in a while and it certainly puts AMD in line with Nvidia and we certainly can not complain about all those new features and performance improvements. As always, you can find the new AMD graphics driver via link below.



Source: AMD.com.