AMD Catalyst Omega 14.12 Driver Performance with Frame Times in CrossFire

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The AMD Catlayst Omega drivers are the culmination of six months of work and AMD promised big changes. We didn’t know what to expect when it came to the performance front, but we were happy to see that a pair of Radeon R9 290 video cards in CrossFire did perform better with the new Catalyst Omega drivers than Catalyst 14.9 drivers. We only tested a handful of game titles, but did find an average Frame Per Second (FPS) improvement in all game titles with the exception of Battlefield 4. The good news is that in all five game titles that we saw improvements when we looked at the frame times and that shows that AMD is still continuing to make frame pacing enhancements. We wish that AMD would release the list of 15 game titles that they made enhancements for, but that hasn’t happened yet. We figured that we will just keep writing about it in the hopes that someone at AMD will get annoyed enough and release the list for us!

At the end of the day we highly advise our readers to download and install the AMD Catalyst Omega (14.12) drivers and try them out. Our testing showed that performance in five game titles stayed the same or improved. The new features and general bug fixes were also welcomed, but we already talked about those in our overview. If you own a video card older than a Radeon R9 or R7 video card you are well aware that you are missing out on the improvements offered by AMD Catalyst Drivers. AMD told us that they do plan on rolling out many if not all of the AMD Catalyst Omega Drivers to those that own a video card based on GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. AMD didn’t give us a timeline as they don’t want to upset anyone if they miss it, but they are working on expanding these features and improvements to those with slightly older graphics cards.

If AMD Catalyst Omega drivers aren’t up to your expectations or are giving you issues be sure to let AMD know about it. AMD has a bug submission/feedback form available here and you should use it! Some of our readers in the overview article mentioned that they were having installation issues. We have not experienced this on any of our systems, but there are reports of it happening on numerous sites and forums.