AMD Catalyst 14.3 beta drivers released for Thief Mantle update

Soon, you may be able to stealing all the food from kitchens at a slightly higher framerate.

Who loves installing new GPU drivers? Everybody, obviously. It’s so much fun. As we indicated yesterday, AMD has released some Catalyst 14.3 beta drivers in conjunction with the Mantle update to Thief. These drivers are so hot that the page heading at AMD still says ‘Catalyst 14.2 beta.’ Or maybe somebody just forgot to change that, who knows.

The main benefits of 14.3 are Mantle and TrueAudio support in Thief, so if you don’t own that game or don’t much care about it then this update isn’t exactly crucial. Here are the self-described ‘feature highlights’ and a brief list of known issues:

Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst™ 14.3 Beta V1.0 Driver for Windows®

• Thief:
  • AMD Mantle and AMD True Audio support
  • Improves stuttering observed in CrossFire mode
• Call of Duty: Ghosts:   QUAD CrossFire profile update – improves level load times
• Audio issues observed when using CrossFire configurations (and V-sync enabled) have been resolved
• BattleField 4:  V-sync issues observed on CrossFire configurations (with Mantle enabled) have been resolved

Known Issues 

• Intermittent driver stability issues when installing/un-installing on Desktop Kaveri platforms that support AMD Enduro technology under Windows 8.1.  Please disable Enduro support to resolve the issue
• Secondary GPUs do not enter low power state on CrossFire configurations; this issue will be addressed in the next AMD Catalyst beta release
• Thief (DirectX):  Lighting flickers on CrossFire configurations only after CrossFire has been enabled then disabled; this issue will be addressed in the next AMD Catalyst beta release
• Battlefield 4 (DirectX):  Quad CrossFire configurations with Eyefinity Display configurations suffer slowdowns and stability issues
• Titanfall:  Flickering occurs under AMD CrossFire configurations

Tomorrow at the Game Developers Conference (GDC,) AMD is devoting several sessions to talking about Mantle. You can read about those talks, and others that AMD has planned at this link.