Introduction

As we roll into the halfway mark for 2011, we see the latest iterations of the Catalyst drivers from AMD come in the form of the Catalyst 11.6. A little earlier than expected, the latest drivers seem to bring some nice features to the table as well as some promises of extra performance.

With a fair bit on offer from the latest drivers, we won't spend any more time blabbing on about them and instead we'll just get into some of the highlights from the release notes; then we'll take a quick look at our testbed and check out the performance of the latest drivers.

New Features

AMD Steady Video

- Steady Video is currently an AMD exclusive feature based on AMD APP Technology
- By applying advanced algorithms behind the scenes, users do not have to deal with shaky or unstable video ever again!
- Capabilities scale with hardware and are end user controlled

Image Stabilization brought to YouTube!

Decode Acceleration of MPEG-4 part 2 content

- AMD has enabled decode acceleration of MPEG-4 part 2 content in Microsoft video player applications (through MFT support) for all AMD Radeon 6000 Series

Performance Enhancements

Crysis - of up to 7% on AMD Radeon HD 6000 series single card configurations.
F1 2010 - of up to 8% in DirectX 11 mode on AMD Radeon HD 6000 series products in single and Crossfire configurations.
Far Cry 2 - of up to 5% on AMD Radeon HD 6000 series products in single and Crossfire configurations.
HAWX - of up to 8% on AMD Radeon HD 6000 series products in single and Crossfire configurations.
Unigine - OpenGL tests of up to 10% on AMD Radeon HD 6000 series single card configurations.