What can we expect from the upcoming AMD Catalyst drivers?

**DJBarry004** · 04-23-2014, 11:11 AM #1

I just read that AMD made available the release of the latest Catalyst driver, 14.4 beta (Release Candidate 1).

It seems to add support for full OpenGL 4.4 support and 4K resolutions for the supported GPUs.

These are the instructions implemented on the update:

ARB_buffer_storage
ARB_enhanced_layouts
ARB_query_buffer_object
ARB_clear_texture
ARB_texture_mirror_clamp_to_edge
ARB_texture_stencil8
ARB_vertex_type_10f_11f_11f_rev
ARB_multi_bind
ARB_bindless_texture
ARB_spare_texture
ARB_seamless_cubemap_per_texture
ARB_shader_draw_parameters
ARB_shader_group_vote

Now that it supports latest OGL version (and so does Dolphin if I´m not wrong), are there going to be any kind
of improvements? Any opinion is accepted and well, hope this will be good news for AMD GPU users. Tongue

Good night.

**NaturalViolence** · 04-23-2014, 11:29 AM #2

DJBarry004 Wrote:are there going to be any kind
of improvements?

How the hell would anyone know? It's not like AMD/Nvidia list the exact changes/optimizations made to their drivers in each update. That's all super low level proprietary stuff.

As far as supporting recent openGL instructions, that shouldn't benefit dolphin.

**pauldacheez** · 04-23-2014, 12:55 PM #3

ARB_buffer_storage is the most useful thing there, but Dolphin already supports AMD_pinned_memory, which is basically the exact same thing except AMD-specific. So there's really no change in functionality or performance besides whatever miscellaneous optimizations they've done in their drivers.

**delroth** · 04-24-2014, 02:01 AM #4

ARB_bindless_texture might be useful if someone implements support for it (less state changes required), same with ARB_multi_bind. The rest is likely to be mostly useless with Dolphin.