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Graphics card vendors have been busy with the onslaught of new PC titles heading into the holiday, forcing AMD to release its second out of cycle performance driver in less than 2 weeks. Catalyst 11.11b includes Crossfire performance scaling for Skyrim, similar multi-gpu support for Assassin’s Creed Revelations, along with DirectX 11 tweaks for Batman Arkham City.
Along with the changes listed above, this pre-release driver includes updates rolled into 11.11a such as fixes for Rage and Battlefield 3. I’ve been testing the driver over the last 24 hours, and I can honestly say, at least in Skyrim’s case, the Crossfire addition makes a huge difference if you have more than one card and have been struggling with frame rates. I’ve been noticing a few new hiccups such as texture flickering in the distance, though I’m sure these will be resolved sometime in the next few weeks when AMD rolls out the official 11.12.
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jlfrank83
November 28, 2011 at 9:45pm
MSI afterburner shows that each of my HD6870s are only being utilized about 50%.
davel6
December 09, 2011 at 6:27pm
Thats because Bethesda designed Skyrim to max out the XBox360 CPU, leaving as little coding as possible for the aging XBox GPU - then ported the XBox version straight to PC without tweaks. Bethesda has abandoned PCs.
h e x e n
November 28, 2011 at 8:00am
Yeah, HUGE difference in Skyrim.
They still need to fix the pre loading into visual memory. Quick turns still slow me down to a few frames per second until it catches up. Like when you just arrive someplace from fast travel, it slows to a crawl if you look around quickly.
The overall improvement though is awesome. I can now run comfortably at 8 and 16 samples.
h e x e n
November 28, 2011 at 5:17am
Thank goodness. I can max every game except Skyrim. It gives me such a horrendous framerate, especially in Solitude. It didn't make any sense to me because BF3 runs flawlessly and looks better.
Installing as soon as I get home.
Anyone else get the kameahmeha wave yet for the Destruction attribute tree? Absolutely ridiculous.
flyup
November 27, 2011 at 6:56pm
Is this update for multiple GPU users only? Skyrim looks stunning on my Radeon HD 5800. I dont want to break my experience with pre-release drivers!
[Looking for Nirnroot in Black Reach - Level 22 Mage]
Lorondos
November 27, 2011 at 8:20pm
Improves performance 2-7% on single GPU configurations.
Though, regarding the 5000 series...the crossfire scaling is coming up in the next release as 11.11b only fixes 6000 series scaling for Skyrim.
mattman059
November 27, 2011 at 8:17pm
The update rendered mine practically unplayable...screen flickers, lights are insanely bright...way to go AMD
Thank goodness for system restore
simplymortified
November 27, 2011 at 6:00pm
"this pre-release driver includes updates rolled into 11.11a such as fixes for Rage"
Huh! Rage is still bug ridden. I'll be interested to see what 11.12 does about it.
Lorondos
November 27, 2011 at 8:23pm
No idea but it still has the AMD multi-core stuttering bug which is apparently on id's side to fix (read somewhere they were suppose to fix it last month) however the point is moot as I forced it to use one core and completed it...stopped the stuttering but took one hell of a performance hit.
