AMD Catalyst 13.1 WHQL drivers released

AMD's first major driver release for 2013 is here in the form of the just-released AMD Catalyst 13.1 WHQL drivers. These drivers are similar to the company's 12.11 "Never Settle" driver, with the new 13.1 WHQL drivers delivering performance enhancements for a huge amount of games.

They mainly aim for the Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs, and AMD have also included some new 3D settings and profile management user interface within the Catalyst Control Center (CCC). This is on top of the performance enhancements and various fixes. From the changelog, we can expect:

• 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

There is a huge list of resolved problems within Windows 8 and Windows 7, which includes:

• 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

AMD also haven't left out their Catalyst Mobility 7970M, which gets a huge performance gain across multiple titles:

• 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%

You can get the new drivers right here.