In a press release, AMD has announced they’re releasing a Catalyst driver for Windows 10, version 15.7. AMD says that their drivers have been downloaded over 40 million times in the past 6 months. Their new Catalyst Windows 10 driver, which will be fully integrated with Windows Updates to provide the latest drivers for your systems, include a number of features for both gamers and heavy graphics users:
- AMD helps Windows 10 stream content at the highest resolutions (4K and beyond) thanks to the hardware-based HEVC decoder
- HEVC DECODE with Xbox Video Player
- STREAMING Xbox One to PC
- Ready for the latest gaming technologies in Windows 10
- Games will look great on your AMD-based PC running Windows 10 because all 2015 AMD APUs will provide support for Microsoft DirectX 12 and AMD FreeSync
- Enabling up to 15X more details in games using DirectX 12 (AMD Internal Testing. 3DMark API Overhead Feature Test. System Configuration: Intel i7-5960X, 16GB DDR4- 2666, 2TB Seagate HDD, AMD Radeon R9 390 GPU, Driver 15.20-150609a-184226E, Windows 10 v.10130. 18,463,548 draw calls per second in DirectX 12, and 1,172,587 in DirectX 11.)
- Supports WDDM 2.0 which works with Windows 10 to reduce the driver workload on graphics hardware. Display modes can be changed quickly and without the bothersome flicker that Windows users had to endure in the past.
In addition, NVIDIA has updated their Windows 10 driver, from 353.30 to 353.49, a hotfix for the following issues:
- Sony Vegas Pro crashes
- Windows 10 installation issue introduced with previous 353.45 driver
- In addition, this driver also includes the same fixes which were part of our previous 353.38 hotfix driver release:
- Chrome Crashes/Freezes/TDRs
- Delays when starting or switching apps & games with GSYNC enabled
I can’t vouch for the gaming issues (there are a number of reports on the NVIDIA forums about problems with Witcher 3), but the driver update does seem to have fixed the annoying problem of IE 11 and/or Edge crashing and then re-opening on closing the browser (or at least I think that’s what fixed it!).
Anyway good to see both AMD and NVIDIA getting ready for Windows 10.
Further reading: beta, Graphics Cards, video, Windows 10
