AMD Catalyst 9.12 Hotfix Enables Crossfire Eyefinity & DisplayPort Audio
by Ryan Smith on December 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Ryan's Ramblings
On a quick note this morning, along with yesterday’s release of the Catalyst 9.12 drivers, AMD has also published a 9.12 hotfix driver that has added a couple of interesting things.
Along with refreshing their line of OpenCL-capable drivers (OpenCL is still not in the mainline driver), AMD has added support for Crossfire Eyefinity. We first saw Crossfire Eyefinity in our Radeon 5970 review, where the feature was enabled solely for the 5970 so that the complete card could be used for Eyefinity. At the time AMD had promised that they would be enabling Crossfire Eyefinity for true Crossfire-paired cards soon, and this is the first step of fulfilling that promise. The need for AMD to whitelist games for Crossfire Eyefinity has not changed, so while it works on Crossfire-paired cards, it still does not work for all games.
The second interesting addition is support for DisplayPort audio. Although we tend to think of DisplayPort as a replacement for DVI rather than HDMI, technically it can serve as a replacement for both. Several of you have been asking us if the 5000 series supported DisplayPort Audio, and we did not have a good answer until now. If you do have a DisplayPort setup that supports audio, then this driver will allow you to finally get audio out of that DisplayPort on your 5000 series card.
On the performance front we have heard that these drivers may offer some respectable performance boosts for the 5000 series, but this isn’t something we’ve had a chance to test. The timing would be good however, since the supply of RV700 cards (4870/4850) have completely dried up, so buying a cheap 4870 in place of a 5700 series card has ceased to be an option.
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ClownPuncher - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link
Try the 9.12 hotfix. It is a full driver package, so no need to apply 9.12 wqhl first.LordanSS - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link
Yep, giving the hotfix a try... as far as the mouse cursor goes, so far so good. Nothing going giant yet, which is a good sign.Goty - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link
Is the giant pointer issue limited to the 5000 series cards? I've got a 4670 in my HTPC running Windows 7 and haven't noticed anything yet, but that may just be due to the fact that I run WMC all the time.LordanSS - Saturday, December 19, 2009 - link
Yes, as far as I know, the giant mouse cursor is related to the 5000 series cards. Never had such a problem with my 4870.As for the hotfix drivers, yeah it has indeed fixed the giant mouse problem (thankfully). Only thing remaining are the massive slowdowns when watching certain videos fullscreen... =/
OCedHrt - Sunday, December 20, 2009 - link
I would check your driver installation or your codecs for this one. This is definitely not a card issue and can be caused by many things not related to video.therealnickdanger - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link
I know that Flash 10.1 is still beta, but I was kind of hoping for some better support from ATI with 9.12. Any word on that?ClownPuncher - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link
From what I hear, there are improvements across the board for flash now. Having not tested it myself, yet, I can't say for sure how accurate this is.hadphild - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link
Can you do 6 screens now?If so I will be buying 2 card for xmas.
yacoub - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link
you have six worthy displays? and a reason to use them all? sounds ridiculoushadphild - Friday, December 18, 2009 - link
I have 6 Projectors that can handle 1920 x 1080 each. So with will be amazing to get a massive display of 5760 x 2160 as a test to show clients what over 4k video will be like.