AMD has released a new set of drivers for its graphics cards. AMD Catalyst 13.1 is the first driver of 2013 and comes with noticeable performance improvements on the entire AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series, with up to 10%-15% more performance in Battlefield 3 in most cases and and enhanced AMD CrossFire scaling performance in Call of Duty Black Ops 2. In addition, AMD has implements a number of fixes for a lot of games.

Those interested can download AMD’s Catalyst 13.1 from here.

Here is the release notes for Catalyst 13.1:

AMD Catalyst Control Center: New 3D settings and profile management user interface:

AMD Catalyst 13.1 features a newly designed 3D application settings page, designed to allow users to more easily adjust and control their 3D settings on a per application basis.

Performance Highlights of AMD Catalyst 13.1 (vs. AMD Catalyst 12.10): Includes all of the performance improvements found in AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11
•Performance gains seen on the entire AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series:
•All game were tested at high / extreme / ultra levels
-Enhanced performance in Far Cry 3 (up to 25% with 8xMSAA, SSAO enabled @ 1600p, and up to 15% with 8xMSAA, HDAO enabled @1600p) (AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 must also be installed)
-Enhanced AMD CrossFire™ scaling performance in Call of Duty Black Ops 2
-Up to 10%-15% more performance in Battlefield 3 in most cases
•More than 20% in certain missions and sequences (Comrades)
-Up to 7% more performance in Metro 2033
-Up to 10% more performance in DiRT Showdown
-Up to 8% more performance in Sleeping Dogs
-Up to 12% more performance in Civilization V
-Up to 10% more performance in StarCraft II
-Up to 8% more performance in Sniper Elite: V2
-Up to 5% more performance in Max Payne 3
•AMD Catalyst Mobility 7970M performance for AMD Enduro™ technology supported platforms has been improved for DirectX® 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications:
-3DMark® 06 – Up to 6%
-3DMark Vantage – Up to 15%
-3DMark 11 – Up to 12%
-AvP – Up to 11%
-Battlefield 3 – Up to 25%
-Call of Duty: Black Ops – Up to 13%
-Crysis 2: Up to 45%
-DiRT Showdown – Up to 62%
-ETQW – Up to 8%
-Hard Reset – Up to 8%
-Just Cause 2 – Up to 90%
-Mafia 2 – Up to 40%
-The Chronicles of Riddick – Up to 4%
-Shogun 2 – Up to 56%
-StarCraft 2 – Up to 25%
-Skyrim – Up to 45%
-Sniper Elite V2 – Up to 60%
-Tom Clancy’s HAWX – Up to 56%
-Unigine Heaven – Up to 33%
-Wolfenstein – Up to 9%

Resolved Issues for the Windows 8 / Windows 7 Operating Systems:

This section provides information on resolved known issues in this release of the AMD Catalyst 13.1 software suite.
•A sporadic system hang encountered with a single AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPU seen on X58 and X79 chipsets.
•An intermittent hang encountered with AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs in an AMD CrossFire + Eyefinity setup.
•Missing fonts in XBMC
•No video found in Media Player Classic Home Cinema when using full or half floating point processing
•Skyrim lighting (missing a lighting pass) for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series
•Skyrim cloud corruption experience in various in game locations
•A hang playing Dishonored on the AMD Radeon HD 6000 and AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series
•Engine and memory clocks running too high when the GPU is idle.
•GPU activity runs at lower values than expected seen on the AMD Radeon HD 7870.
•Corruption seen in Darkness 2 and Carrier Command when using AMD CrossFire configurations
•Adobe Premier Pro CS6 may fail to launch
•Hang experienced with AMD Crossfire and Eyefinity enabled on X58 and X78 chipsets
•Corel PaintShop Pro X3 – Hangs at the “Initializing Command Manager” window
•Company of Heroes 2 – display corruption experienced when AA is enabled in the AMD Catalyst Control Center
•Cyberlink Powerdirector 10 crashes intermittently.
•Company of Heroes : Tales of Valor – Flickering experienced when AA is disabled
•Max Payne 3 – Flickering experienced in DirectX 9 mode with forced AA enabled
•Cyberlink PoweDVD 10 – crashes intermittently
•VLC – Green texture corruption seen in 720p MPEG2 video clips
•Black screen encountered when “Alternate DVI mode” is enabled in the AMD Catalyst Control Center
•Green display corruption seen in Skype webcam video

Known Issues

The following section provides a summary of open issues that may be experienced with the AMD Catalyst 13.1 software suite.

Known issues under the Windows 8 Operating System.
•Sleeping Dogs – game may fail to launch in certain configurations

Known issues under the Windows 7 Operating System.
•Shogun 2 – Total War : flickering experienced when game is run in medium quality mode

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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