AMD Catalyst 11.11a boosts Skyrim performance, more

AMD has followed up on their 11.11 release from just a few days ago. The newly relased Catalyst 11.11a"performance" driver addresses a number of performance issues as well as a couple of bugs found in 11.11.

Rage and Skyrim get most of the love from 11.11a, but Batman Arkham City and Battlefield 3 were also singled out with bug fixes. The small number of improvements listed here are in addition to a long list of changes made in 11.11. AMD has since pulled 11.11 from their downloads section and replaced it with 11.11a.

Batman Arkham City

• Improves DirectX 11 performance for single GPU and CrossFireX configurations

Rage

• Delivers AMD CrossfireX performance scaling
• Resolves a number of image / stability issues seen with the title:
• Fix geometry corruption, sometimes seen in Bash TV entrance
• Fix issues with Low-memory conditions on 32bit systems.
• Fix issue with extreme corruption with missing textures on 32bit systems.
• Fix memory leaks when deleting/reusing sync objects.
• Fix hitching and pausing, especially noticeable on some Quad Core systems when doing races and Stanley Express runs.
• Fix some missing shadows

Elder Scrolls Skyrim

• Improves performance 2-7% on single GPU configurations
• Resolve corruption seen when enabling Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing on the AMD Radeon HD 6970 Series
• Disables CrossFireX (to resolve negative scaling and image quality issues seen when CrossFireX is enabled)
• AMD is continuing to work on a CrossFireX solution for Skyrim – as soon as it’s ready we’ll make it publicly available

Battlefield 3

• Resolves intermittent corruption seen when playing the game at specific camera angles

Noteworthy improvements from the previous 11.11 release include Flash 11 hardware acceleration, various operating system fixes, improved multi-monitor handling and a multitude of game fixes for titles like Dragon Age 2, Shogun 2, Far Cry 2, Rage, Homefront, Dead Space 2, Bulletstorm, Civilization V and more.

The 11.11a driver package can be downloaded for both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista/7. AMD recommends this release for Radeon 5000 and 6000 HD owners only, however, it should install for most not-so-older chipsets as well. If you have problems getting it installed on your aging board, modded versions are already floating around the web.

Most laptops sporting a Radeon 5000 or 6000 HD series chip are compatible with 11.11a as well, although support will vary from model to model. Toshiba, Panasonic and some Sony laptops are called out specifically for their incompatibility.

Intel demos Knights Ferry CPU, 1 teraflop performance from a single chip

Intel has revealed a new processor with more than 50 cores at the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle. The groundbreaking chip was running in a test machine and is capable of crossing the 1 teraflop, or a trillion floating point operations per second, performance barrier.

To put that into perspective, Intel unveiled the first supercomputer to cross the 1 teraflop mark in 1997. That system was comprised of 9,298 Pentium II processors that filled 72 full-sized cabinets. In comparison, the new processor called Knights Ferry is about the size of a matchbook and can achieve the same level of performance.

Knights Ferry was designed in the Portland area and has just started manufacturing. The chip is based on Intel’s MIC, or Many Integrated Core architecture. Intel had a demo system running but reporters weren’t allowed to take photographs of it. In fact, the system wasn’t even in the same room as the presentation. An exact core count and power requirements weren’t disclosed either – all we know is that the 22nm chip features more than 50 cores and uses a PCI express slot.

Production models of Knights Ferry are still a good ways out and it’s unclear if a version of the demo unit will ever find its way to consumer systems. It’s much more likely that Intel will use Knights Ferry technology to build the next generation of supercomputers. Intel and its partners hope to deliver said systems by 2018.

Either way, Knights Ferry is extremely impressive from a performance standpoint and shows just how far processor technology has come in less than 15 years.