AMD Releases Catalyst 15.9.1 Beta Drivers
by Daniel Williams on October 2, 2015 7:00 AM EST
In a rare episode for AMD we get to see a second beta driver release in the same week. Earlier this week (Tuesday September 29th) AMD had released their Catalyst 15.9 Beta Driver. It brought optimizations to the Fable Legends benchmark we all saw recently and the upcoming Star Wars: BattleFront beta along with a grocery list of other fixes.
Unfortunately a major memory leak was discovered shortly after release that could be triggered when a browser or other windows were resized. The result of this memory leak was all of the video memory on the graphics card being consumed. Upon becoming aware AMD was prompt to announce through Twitter and on their own site that there was a problem and had recommended those affected to revert drivers.
Late on Wednesday AMD re-released their 15.9 beta driver as the 15.9.1 Beta driver to address this issue. The Display Driver version is still 15.201.1151, leaving the only change here being to fix the memory leak. If you have updated to 15.9 it would be advisable to update again to 15.9.1 to avoid the memory leak.
Those looking for the driver update can find it on AMD's Catalyst Beta download page.
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D. Lister - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
AMD was actually uncharacteristically quick in dealing with this one, good job.Chaser - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Considering it was a fix to a broken release I would certainly hope so.BurntMyBacon - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Some might say that most releases from AMD in recent memory were "broken releases". Granted, this break could be considered more critical. Nonetheless, I have to agree with D. Lister that they did well dealing with this one quickly rather than the more typical pull the release and delay it a month or three to deal with the issues.Sign of things to come? Would be nice, but the skeptic in me doubts it. Still, I'll give credit where credit is due. Good job AMD.
Communism - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
This was a blatant bug that almost instantly causes buffer overflow in 100% of cases.The fact that the blatently buggy release was even sent out to the public is the sign that AMD DGAF about proper testing.
D. Lister - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
It's not that they DGAF, but rather after the several layoffs* they sadly Do Not Have Enough Testers, and beta testing is almost entirely left to the end users.* https://www.google.com/search?q=amd+layoffs&oq...
DiHydro - Wednesday, October 7, 2015 - link
Beta testing on a Beta driver! I don't believe it!StevoLincolnite - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link
Because nVidia have never released a buggy driver... No. Never. They were only a cause of a large fraction of Vista's blue screens and other issues since then.These drivers are getting stupidly complex and costly for both camps, they already eclipsed the NT Kernel years ago in regards to how many lines of code they have, stuff like this will happen, regardless of the company you go with.
Strunf - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link
They are becoming complex cause they are now using per game optimisations, not to mention they install many non driver related "options".HiroshiTrinn - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
These (the former) drivers caused consistent crashes in Diablo 3. Not unexpected that they would jump into damage control when very popular current titles blow up in your face after a release.rochlin - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Hard to believe AMD had a bug in 15.8 that killed something as basic as Photoshop & Lightroom GPU acceleration for more than a month. They just didn't seem to care about it. No info. No patch (even though it proved to be a simple typo in their code per one poster who made his own patch). I've built a new machine with an Nvidia, card. They seems to have finally leapfrogged AMD. Good riddance to AMD & wonky driver bugs and PITA updates!