AMD Catalyt Omega promises big gains and new features

Looks like AMD messed up on Friday by accidentally publishing a premature build of Catalyst Omega, the company's next-generation driver. We don't know when the driver will be officially released but some sites were quick enough to capture the details.

The Catalyst Omega release promises better performance, quality improvements and several new features. Claims of up to 19% more performance with high-end GPUs and even a whopping up to 29% performance boost on APUs sound very promising, as well as new features such as Virtual Super Resolution, new video features, new Gaming Evolved features, TressFX Hair 3.0, etc. The Virtual Super Resolution sounds very similar to what NVIDIA is doing with its Dynamic Super Resolution, basically rendering games at 4K and downscaling them for enhanced visual quality.

Catalyst Omega is said to raise high-end GPU performance by up to 19%, and a staggering 29% on APU cards. The new driver boasts a number of additional features, such as Virtual Super Resolution, which renders games at 4K then scales them down to the monitor’s respective resolution, making anti-aliasing obsolete.

Other video features include Fluid Motion to reduce judder and increase interpolation, Contour Removal to remove compression artifacts cleanly, and 1080p Detail Enhancement to scale up and sharpen images for larger monitors.

The treats don’t end there, though, with support for Gaming Evolved client specific features (notably FPS measure and streaming) , TressFX Hair 3.0, OpenCL 2.0, and Mantle game capture. Using EyeInfinity, Catalyst Omega is capable of powering 24 monitor arrays on 4 GPU systems. FreeSync, Alienware Graphics Amplifier, and 5K support is also incorporated.

Source: eTeknix