AMD Catalyst 13.9 WHQL Drivers Available
by Jarred Walton on September 19, 2013 4:31 PM EST- Posted in
- AMD
- Radeon
- Drivers
- Windows 8.1
- WHQL
Going along with this morning’s NVIDIA drivers announcement, AMD has released their latest 13.9 WHQL drivers today. AMD’s way of doing driver releases can frankly get a bit confusing, as there are hotfixes, betas, and WHQL releases all on different version numbers. For example, while the 13.9 WHQL came out today, the 13.10 beta drivers released a couple weeks ago. Regardless, you can download the new drivers (or the beta drivers) from AMD’s site; the release notes also cover what the new drivers bring to the table.
The short summary is that these are AMD’s first WHQL WDDM 1.3 drivers, designed to support Windows 8.1. On desktop systems, these drivers are available for everything that has DX11 support – HD 5000 and later, more or less – including the Llano, Trinity, and Richland APUs as well as Kabini and Temash (Brazos is not listed as being supported). Note that the 13.9 WHQL drivers do not include the frame pacing fixes that are available in the latest 13.10 beta or the latest CrossFire optimizations.
For my part, I downloaded and installed the WHQL drivers on an MSI GX60 notebook to see if they would work – which as usual required the use of the AMD Mobility Radeon Driver Verification Tool. I had previously installed the 13.10 beta drivers on this notebook and found that several aspects of Enduro were broken/missing (specifically, the Global Switchable Graphics options did not populate the drop-down lists). Thankfully, the WHQL drivers installed properly and all of the standard Enduro features appear to be working. I wouldn’t expect to see any performance increases for Enduro at this stage, as AMD doesn’t make mention of any Enduro optimizations, but if you’ve had problems with any of the recent beta releases then hopefully these drivers will work better.
And thanks to reader Infy102 for mentioning the availability of the new drivers. We don’t intentionally try to slight any of the manufacturers, but we often miss the launch dates of drivers and writing about them several days (or weeks) later means we’ve already missed the boat.
Source: AMD Drivers Page
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Elixer - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
Sadly, it seems AMD has dropped support for Vista with this WHQL driver, and all the new beta drivers as well.This seems really shortsighted on AMD's part.
Both Intel & Nvidia still support Vista.
Gigaplex - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
While it does seem short sighted, I doubt many users wishing to stay on the bleeding edge on graphics drivers are still using Vista.HGLatinBoy - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
GottemRyan Smith - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
We've been trying to get a comment out of AMD on that, which is why this wasn't posted right away. If we succeed we'll be sure to update this article.dragonsqrrl - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
Thanks for the infoElixer - Monday, September 30, 2013 - link
Still no word on this ?I thought at the GPU event, it would have been easy to ask ?
RU482 - Sunday, September 22, 2013 - link
not sure if seriousBonee - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
Well, as I see they still failed to address the graphics accelerating related bugs in windows 8 x64...Wreckage - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
Still no official support for frame pacing. It's been nearly 2 years.JPForums - Monday, September 23, 2013 - link
Two years since when?Problems with frame latency with the 7950 (and apparently other 7000 series cards) were quantified late (December) last year IIRC. The result was new sets of drivers from AMD that addressed latency and not just frame rate. This was a generic issue, not specific to crossfire setups.
In February of this year, there was some notion that Crossfire may have a serious issue. Work started to quantify what exactly this was. Some time in April, AMD acknowledged that there was a problem and it had totally taken them by surprise. It has been less than a 1/2 year since then.
Nvidia has apparently been working on the FCAT toolset for something like 2 years, but how would AMD know that. Yes AMD has issues that they should be able to resolve with proper frame pacing. Yes, Nvidia figured this out well more than two years ago (kudos to them). However, it took them more than two years to get to the point where they were ready to show the world. Why do so many people expect the same out of AMD in less than 1/4 the time.
Bottom line: I don't recommend AMD for multiGPU solutions and won't until they get their lack of smoothness fixed. That has been my standpoint long before FCAT and frame latency measurements showed up on review sites as it stuttering was pretty obvious. In fact, I didn't really recommend multiGPU setups at all until the GTX200 series and I still didn't particularly like them until the GTX400 series. That all said, I don't see how people can reasonably expect AMD to fix this problem in less than half a year when Nvidia took well more than two years to do the same. Just continue dodging AMD for multiGPU setups until they get it straightened out. People who are fine with AMD multiGPU setups should still be fine with them. They didn't suddenly get any worse. It just became easier to test for the problem.