IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 27/01/2011

AMD Catalyst 11.1 and 11.1a hotfix released
It's come a little late this month, but AMD's first Catalyst release of 2011 is now here, complete with its new-look Catalyst Control Center, OpenGL 4.1 support and a couple of notable performance enhancements.  Oh, and there's a hotfix available too, to give you some new tessellation and texture filtering options to play with if you so desire.

New Features:

The new Catalyst Control Center

• The new Catalyst Control Center enables a simplified user experience to help users get the most out of their AMD product
  • Easily enable 3D settings to enhance game image quality
  • Setup multiple displays to increase productivity
  • Adjust power settings to increase battery life
• Supports two unique views – designed for mainstream and advanced users
• User Interface dynamically updates based on available AMD hardware

Support for OpenGL 4.1

• New features introduced in OpenGL 4.1
  • Full compatibility with OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs for easier porting between mobile and desktop platforms
  • The ability to query and load a binary for shader program objects to save re-compilation time
  • The capability to bind programs individually to programmable stages for programming flexibility
  • 64-bit floating-point component vertex shader inputs for higher geometric precision
  • Multiple viewports for a rendering surface for increased rendering flexibility

Performance highlights:
F1 2010:

• Performance increases up to 12% on AMD Radeonâ„¢ HD 6900 and AMD Radeonâ„¢ HD 6800 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.
• Performance increases up to 10% on ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5800 Series single card configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.

Left 4 Dead 2:

• Performance increases up to 17% on AMD Radeonâ„¢ HD 6800 Series single and Crossfire configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.
• Performance increases up to 8% on AMD Radeonâ„¢ HD 6900 Series single configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.

You can download Catalyst 11.1 for your Operating System of choice from the AMD Game web site.  Meanwhile, here's the full details on that hotfix:

• Performance improvements for the AMD Radeon HD 6800 & HD 6900 series in a number of applications
• Catalyst Control Center – New Tessellation controls
  • Gives users full control over the tessellation levels used in applications
• Catalyst AI Texture Filtering updates
  • The Quality setting has now been improved to match the High Quality setting in all respects but one;  it enables an optimization that limits tri-linear anisotropic filtering to areas surrounding texture mipmap level transitions, while doing bilinear anisotropic filtering elsewhere.  This optimization offers a way to improve filtering performance without visibly affecting image quality
  • The Performance setting has also been updated to address comments about the sharpness of the default Quality setting causing shimmering in certain cases.  It now provides a smoother filtering option that eliminates most shimmering while preserving the improved detail provided by anisotropic filtering.

The Catalyst 11.1a hotfix can be downloaded from here.
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AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB and XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition
While yesterday was all about NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti launch, it really should be noted that AMD tried their hardest to spoil that party with some new offerings of their own which sit astride their rival's new part like some kind of pincer movement.  Thus, priced just above the GeForce GTX 560 we now have a 1GB variant of the Radeon HD 6950, while below it comes the threat of some factory overclocked Radeon HD 6870 boards.

Today was originally supposed to be about the newly released GeForce GTX 560 Ti – NVIDIA’s new GF114-based $250 video card. Much as was the case with the launch of AMD’s Radeon HD 6800 series however, AMD is itching to spoil NVIDIA’s launch with their own push. Furthermore they intend to do so on two fronts: directly above the GTX 560 Ti at $259 is the Radeon HD 6950 1GB, and somewhere below it one of many factory overclocked Radeon HD 6870 cards, in our case an XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition. The Radeon HD 6950 1GB is effectively the GTX 560 Ti’s direct competition, while the overclocked 6870 serves to be the price spoiler.

Anandtech takes a look at both the Radeon HD 6950 1GB and XFX's Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition.
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