AMD Catalyst Omega mega release offers 20 new features

After a leak late last week, AMD now officially announces its Catalyst 14.12 "Omega" driver, you can download it over here. The Omega release promises big enhancements across the board, including performance gains, 20 new features and 400 bug fixes. AMD says it plans to make it a tradition to introduce one Omega driver a year, which will pack a lot of major new features.

Here's an overview of what's new in the first Catalyst Omega driver:

Virtual Super Resolution: This is similar to NVIDIA's Dynamic Super Resolution, it enables Radeon R9 285 and R9 290 series owners to render games above the display's native resolution to achieve higher visual quality via downscaling. The supported VSR modes depend on your monitor's native resolution and your GPU. A future version of VSR will enable 4K downscaling on more configurations as well as support for cards like the Radeon R7 260 and up.

FreeSync support: Omega introduces support for AMD's FreeSync technology. The first displays with FreeSync are expected in January/February 2015.

Frame Pacing Enhancements for 17 games and benchmarks as well as CrossFire Frame Pacing improvements

Eyefinity support for up to 24 displays (4 GPUs)

Performance enhancements: AMD claims up to 19 percent more performance in some GPUs and up to 29 percent more performance on various APUs. The comparison base for AMD's test however was the old AMD Catalyst 13.12 WHQL driver so actual gains versus more recent releases are expected to be much smaller. AMD also promises some performance gains in recent titles versus Catalyst 14.9 WHQL.

New hardware support: 5K display support and support for Alienware Graphics Amplifier

Video enhancements: AMD Fluid Motion Video for smoother Blu-ray playback with low-power APUs and and a new Contour Removal algorithm for higher image quality with compressed videos. Additionally, AMD now also offers 1080p Detail Enhancement for APUs and introduces Ultra HD-Like Experience, which promises to make 1080p videos more 4K-like.

OpenCL 2.0 support

Driver efficiency: Up to 15 percent more performance for some AMD platforms thanks to multi-core optimizations.

Bug fixes and quality assurance improvements

Capture and streaming support for Mantle games