AMD Catalyst 15.6 Beta Driver for Windows OS out now

Wait, are there significant differences between the two drivers? I'm so confused right now with all the drivers floating around.

 

I'm shocked that the AMD in their infinite wisdom split 200 and 300 series, particularly coupled with the fact that most 300s are rebrands.
390x is virtually identical to 290x (pcb is literally the same) with twice the memory.
980 ti SLI setup it is, can't wait for water cooled models.

 

Can we get a draw call test on these drivers please?
Do these drivers contain the tessellation improvements?

 

Works about the same as 15.5 for Witcher 3 for me on Crossfire. Not any noticeable difference and still the same rendering issues (skippy cutscenes, hair flailing around, flickering shadows).

 

because it's the same 15.5 with game improvements for batman, nothing else.

 

There are two big "forks" of drivers since the beginning of the year.

The first "fork" is the official driver, which is similar to 14.12, just with game profiles added. These are the 15.4, 15.5 and 15.6 drivers.

At the same time, AMD was developing another "fork" that has huge performance improvements both in stuttering and framerates. We got those drivers because they had to give them to Microsoft for Windows 10 apparently. These are the 1018, 1023.0. 1023.5, 1040, and the two "R300" drivers asder00 leaked.

The 15.15 drivers from AMD are from that line of drivers, that's what you see such huge differences between the 290x and the 390x in benchmarks. Sure, the bios tweaks and the extra VRAM speed help, but the actual performance gains are from the driver.

And AMD won't officially release that driver for the rest of their hardware, which is disgusting and disingenuous, since the drivers work perfectly well with it and they simply do it so that people will buy the new expensive 390x instead of the bargain price 290x.

I lost a bit of faith with the whole VSR thing, but this makes me wanna puke.

 

How do you know? I really hope that's not the case.

 

It IS the case already. The 300 series drivers work just fine with all their hardware. The 300 series cards are rebranded GCN 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 cards. They work with everything. If you don't believe me, just use their DLL in your game folder and you'll get the same performance benefits. The 1040 are from the same branch and they work on EVERYTHING.

They just do it so that the 300 series looks much better to the older cards in benchmarks.

 

So much for those "huge differences".

 

yes, basically amd is ignoring anything other than windows 10, so the "official" drivers (both beat and whql) have been the same since december, but thanks to asder and other modders, we can install the windows 10 drivers that have been constantly updated and actually improving, specially the awful cpu overhead regular ones have.

 

Not even taking into account every single person in this forum that has said that the Windows 10 fork has significant improvements, you can always take a look here.

They basically found that what brought the 390x to 980 levels was the driver, which is not a surprise to anyone in this forum since January at least.

Also from the Digial Foundry:

So yes, they do it so that the idiots will go get a 390x at $430 instead of a 290x at $320. It is lame and horrible.

 

It's not the first time they did it as you know.

What are the differences between a 7970 OCed (GHz edition) and a 280X?:

The name, the price and maybe the VSR support due to the addition of a marvellous "hardware scaler".

 

They didn't do the VSR thing yet (where the 280x has it while the 7970 does not), but this driver business is unethical and inexcusable. This is NVIDIA level villainy right there.

 

+1000

 

Yep. Convince the fools in your lies and sell your product at high price At the end they lose their trust among smart people...but in real life on this planet are so much more stupid (or trusting, or uninformed) people than "smart"...I'd say the vast majority of population...so what's the difference? They will get their profit anyways. Meh...corporations...no conscientiousness...no responsibility.

 

My question is, is AMD "still working" on the flickering issues with xfire in MKX and the Witcher 3? SMH AMD ...

 

What they don't realize is that people who don't know their computers well are going to ask people like us what to get.

 

My bet is this is timed. Soon we'll have a single unified driver for all the supported (non-legacy) cards.
It's this or AMD loses me.

Yup, I had it once. Using the 14.12 Omega...

 

Still the performance differences in benchies come from 390x/390 having higher clocks (stable ones at that) not because of the drivers really. I think the biggest difference in the price comes from 8gb ram vs 4 I don't think 290x 8gb would be that much cheaper then 390x.

 

Does this release just tweak stuff for the new Batman or have other general improvements made it in as well? So many complaints about the well-known and ongoing issues don't help much to get any useful information about this new 15.6 release.

To anyone still having black screen issues: try swapping your display cable. I had this bug when waking the machine and new drivers did nothing - it turned out to be a glitchy DisplayPort cable. I replaced the cable and haven't seen the bug since.

If you're getting black screens just sitting at desktop or while web browsing you probably have a defective card. Even when it handles games fine at load, if the gpu is throwing errors while at idle speeds and volts then its not operating within spec and should be RMA'd.

Complaining about weird hardware problems in new driver release threads is just wasting oxygen. Troubleshoot and fix it yourself, RMA it, or buy a new card - sitting around complaining about how the driver wont fix your broken hardware will achieve nothing.