AMD Catalyst™ 13.3 Beta3 includes all of the fixes found in previous versions of AMD Catalyst 13.3 Beta.
Feature Highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 13.3 Beta3 Driver for Windows®

• Resolves an intermittent hang seen in Crossfire configurations with the new Crysis 3 patch.

Feature Highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 13.3 Beta2 Driver for Windows®

• Improve performance in Sim City 5 up to 16 percent
• Improves performance in Far Cry 3 up to 5 percent
• Improves latency performance issues seen in Tomb Raider and Hitman Absolution
• Resolves slight corruption seen in Tomb Raider with TressFX enabled for CrossFire and single GPU configurations

• UPLS Off = Power Saving Functions Disabled
• ULPS On = Power Saving Functions Enabled (default)

Note Windows 8 Users: You will need to Disable Driver Signature Enforcement between installing the Catalyst Driver.

Driver Packaging Version: 12.10.17-130226a-153761E-ATI
Catalyst Version: 13.2
2D Driver Version: 8.01.01.1295
Direct3D Version: 9.14.10.0960
OpenGL Version: 6.14.10.12172
Catalyst Control Center Version: 2013.0226.1356.24951

• Added HydraVision 4.2.248.0
• Added AMD Avivo Codec
• Catalyst Control Center detects all supported cards as a HD7900 Series Card for Desktop Drivers
• Unlocked Test Custom Clocks and Auto-Tune options under OverDrive
• Re-included atipdlxx.dll and atipdl64.dll into the package (better support with 3rd party tools)
• Enabled the Update Driver Option through the Catalyst Install Manager.
• Disabled ULPS

FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE AMD CATALYST 13.2 BETA 7 DRIVER

• Resolves an intermittent hang seen in Crossfire configurations with the new Crysis 3 patch.

FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE AMD CATALYST 13.2 BETA 6 DRIVER

• Resolves minor anti-aliasing corruption seen in Crysis 3
• Improves Hitman Absolution Crossfire scaling
• Fixes graphical corruption on onbjects and textures in Call of Duty – Black Ops 2

FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE AMD CATALYST 13.2 BETA 5 DRIVER

• Crysis 3 multi-player Beta: Improves CrossFire scaling by up to 40%
• Far Cry 3: Improves performance up to 10% at 2560×1600 with 8xAA
• New 3D Mark release: Adds CrossFire profile support for the new 3D Mark release under Windows 8

On the matter at hand, I “rage quitted” this project two times already because some things just don’t make any sense to me. Microstutter in Skyrim has been resolved (kind of) with 13.2 Betas, unfortunately I couldn’t say exactly why…So I’ve redone all Skyrim tests with 12.11 Beta 11 and 13.2 Beta 4, fresh start. I’ve done all the tests while standing still so I can read things more easily…

In the previous article, we saw that the delay between when a frame is rendered and the time it is sent to the Flip Queue was high, about 20ms, while with 1 core the time was well below 1ms. GPUView sees this behavior as “High Latency” and this is what made me think. This time around, I’m going to completely reconsider latency as more of an issue of input lag and not microstutter.

Let’s begin by taking a look at what actually changed for the end user with 13.2 Beta 4 and Skyrim:

It looks much better now, still, every couple of seconds, a frame comes along that messes things up. This patterns was also visible before 12.4 Beta so I guess it’s nothing new.

Significantly improves latency

If AMD wanted to remove frame latency they failed miserably and removed most of the microstutter (Edit: At least for Skyrim, in Borderlands 2 things are much better, see the comments section). Since I started “working” with GPUView, for me, latency means a completely different thing. (now) For me, Frame Latency means how much time it takes for a certain frame to reach the display from the time it starts rendering.

So let’s take another look at the relationship between Present Calls and Flip Queue Calls:

In the first case everything is pretty hectic, frame is rendered and sometimes it takes 7 ms, sometimes 20 (or longer) ms to be sent to the Flip Queue.With 13.2 Beta 4, it takes ~15ms everytime from the time the frame is ready and the moment it is sent the Flip Queue. Both cases are bad, but with 13.2 Beta 4 the timings are at least the same every time. Remember how things went with 1 core affinity?

Yeah, the time between the two calls was of about 0.07 ms…Again, this behavior has nothing to do with Microstutter but with general latency. We’ve got to have naming standards, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to communicate.

What has to do with microstutter are the following graphs:

Present Calls are the events that mark the time when a frame has been rendered. With 12.11 Beta, these Present Calls come at different intervals while with the newest Catalyst Beta they come at regular intervals. If I knew how to export the Present Calls timings from GPUView and insert them in a graph, I’d get the same pattern as seen in the first two Fraps Frametimes graphs.

Probably the most important question is Why is it all “better” now? And honestly, I have no idea apart from a theory that matches up to what AMD explained they needed to do to to improve “latency” with Skyrim and other games.

Here’s how it goes: Let’s consider 1 second of rendering time for Skyrim with both drivers, 12.11 Beta 11 and 13.2 Beta:

From what I could gather inside GPUView, I assume the buffer was increased by about 3 times, freeing up the CPU Queue considerably.

12.11 Beta 11	13.2 Beta 4

Another interesting thing that changed between the two drivers is how the threading works. With 12.11 Beta 11 we got one thread loading up the atiumdag.dll (Direct3D functionality) and is executed non stop, about 98% of time, now, with 13.2 Beta 4 the thread is executed only about 15% of time. I don’t know how this is even possible but the overall CPU Usage has gone down by 50% !

On to the frame that every couple of seconds takes a very high amount of time to render. I noticed in GPUView that every 2 seconds, the main rendering thread is executed 100% of the time, basically hogging the whole rendering process. Here is where the problematic frame takes about 70ms to render, according to GPUView and Fraps confirms this. In this time (70ms), there are literaly thousands of thread priority changes, which is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t know the exact cause of the issue but it looks like it’s a broken loop of some sort. Well, taking a closer look this behavior is present across the board so I assume it is normal.

That’s all I could come up for now. There are a few more interesting events I noticed in GPUView, unfortunately I can’t present them because I am unsure of what they actually mean. A good example would be “Lock Allocation Calls” which are present only in those 70ms where that frame is rendered very slowly. Looking around the Internet, I’ve created an opinion on what they could mean but it’s an assumption at best. While GPUView is a beast of a tool, it’s all new to me and it’s frustrating not knowing 99% of what all its features mean and do.

Skyrim Settings: Ultra Settings @ 1920×1080 – 8xMSAA – 16xAF – Tested in the plains E of Rorikstead while standing still.

FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE AMD CATALYST 13.2 BETA 4 DRIVER

• Improves performance in the Crysis 3 Multi-Player Beta by up to 50% when 4x and 8x MSAA are enabled.

• UPLS Off = Power Saving Functions Disabled
• ULPS On = Power Saving Functions Enabled (default)

Note Windows 8 Users: You will need to Disable Driver Signature Enforcement between installing the Catalyst Driver.

Driver Packaging Version: 12.10.17-130128a-152570E-ATI
Catalyst Version: 13.2
2D Driver Version: 8.01.01.1295
Direct3D Version: 9.14.10.0960
OpenGL Version: 6.14.10.12171
Catalyst Control Center Version: 2013.0129.7.94

• Added HydraVision 4.2.248.0
• Added AMD Avivo Codec
• Catalyst Control Center detects all supported cards as a HD7900 Series Card for Desktop Drivers
• Unlocked Temporal AA
• Unlocked High Quality AF
• Unlocked Geometry Instancing
• Unlocked LOD option
• Unlocked Adaptive Anti-Aliasing Quality Slider (can be buggy)
• Unlocked Test Custom Clocks and Auto-Tune options under OverDrive
• Re-included atipdlxx.dll and atipdl64.dll into the package (better support with 3rd party tools)
• Enabled the Update Driver Option through the Catalyst Install Manager.
• Disabled ULPS

AIDA64 will be present at this year’s CeBIT in Hannover, Germany. At the world’s largest ICT fair, held from March 5 to 9, 2013, we will be showcasing the latest edition of our software at the booth of our distribution partner SICONTACT IT-Solutions GmbH (Hall 12, Stand D34). Our IT experts will be available at the booth to provide information about our flagship business product: AIDA64 Business Edition. Visit us at Hall 12, Stand D34!

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OCZ Vector and Intel Atom Z2760 Support

The new AIDA64 update offers optimized benchmarks for Intel Atom Z2760, implements support for OpenCL 1.2 Update and OpenGL ES 3.0, and provides GPU details for the latest AMD Radeon and nVIDIA GeForce graphics accelerators.

New features & improvements

• Optimized benchmarks for Intel Atom Z2760 “Cloverview” SoC
• Preliminary support for AMD “Richland” APU and Intel “Valleyview” SoC
• Improved support for Intel “Haswell” APU and Intel “Lynx Point” PCH
• APP SDK 2.8, OpenCL 1.2 Update, OpenGL ES 3.0, Simple Firmware Interface support
• OCZ Vector SSD and Indilinx Barefoot 3 SSD controller support
• GPU details for AMD Radeon HD 7470, AMD Radeon HD 7870 “Tahiti LE”, nVIDIA GeForce GT 635M, nVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX

Pricing and Availability

AIDA64 Extreme Edition and AIDA64 Business Edition are available now at www.aida64.com/online-store.
Additional information on product features, system requirements, and language versions is available at www.aida64.com/products.
Join our Discussion Forum at forums.aida64.com.
AIDA64 license renewal is now available. For more information, visit www.aida64.com/aida64-renewal.

A migration program is available for all EVEREST customers at www.aida64.com/everest-upgrade.

AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta 3 is now available, and includes the following updates:

• Improves performance up to 15% in high MSAA cases for the Crysis 3 beta release. Future updates will be made to AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta to further improve performance in Crysis 3 for both single GPU and CrossFire configurations
• Significantly improves latency performance in Skyrim, Boderlands 2, and Guild Wars 2
• Improves single GPU performance up to 50% for DmC Devil May Cry
• Improves CrossFire performance up to 10% for Crysis 2
• Resolves Texture flickering seen in DirectX9.0c applications.