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AMD Announces Catalyst 14.2 Beta as Launch Drivers for Thief

By Wong Chung Wee - on 5 Mar 2014, 10:41am

AMD Announces Catalyst 14.2 Beta as Launch Drivers for Thief

AMD has announced the availability of AMD Catalyst 14.2 Beta for Windows OS, as launch drivers for Thief. Thief is the new game title that breathes new life into a classic franchise. The new drivers promise graphical effects exclusive to the said game title, as well as improvements that include better support for the Mantle API, and multi-GPU frame pacing for Battlefield 3 and 4 titles.

(Image Source: AMD)

First of all, with the new drivers from AMD, Thief gamers will enjoy special graphical effects such as the following:-

  • Compute shader-accelerated depth of field for realistic focal lengths
  • Silhouette-enhancing tessellation to improve character geometry
  • SSAA for smooth edges
  • Complex shadowing systems

AMD TrueAudio Technology is able to bring gamers accurate real-time interactive positional audio and with more real-time voices and channels in-game. (Image Source: AMD)

Support for the two marquee features of the AMD GCN 2.0 architecture, Mantle API and AMD TrueAudio, appears to be missing from the initial launch of Thief. According to the specifications page of the new drivers, multi-GPU support for the Mantle API on Battlefield 4 is now enabled. There are also some improvements made to frame pacing, a continuation of their efforts that we highlighted in an earlier report. The rest of the issues addressed by the new beta drivers include bug fixes for the DirectX 9 API, and missing textures for the Minecraft game title.

For more technical details of the AMD Catalyst 14.2 Beta drivers for Windows, please visit this link. For Linux gamers, AMD has also released the AMD Catalyst 14.2 Beta Linux drivers, with bug fixes for the games, Minecraft and X-Plane.

(Source: AMD (1), (2))

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