Possibly the most antecipated Catalyst driver is now ready for download! Catalyst 14.1 Beta includes Mantle API support giving Battlefield 4 some nice performance boost for R9 290/R9 290X users.

What Mantle does

Mantle is the harmony of three essential ingredients:

A driver within the AMD Catalyst™ software suite that lets applications speak directly to the Graphics Core Next architecture; A GPU or APU enabled with the Graphics Core Next architecture; An application or game written to take advantage of Mantle.

Mantle reduces the CPU’s workload by giving developers a way to talk to the GPU directly with much less translation. With less work for the CPU to do, programmers can squeeze much more performance from a system, delivering the greatest benefits in gaming systems where the CPU can be the bottleneck. Learn more about Mantle.

Radeon HD 7000 series, R9 270X and R9 280X users will see limited performance gains in this first release of Battlefield 4 patch for Mantle, AMD says performance is still being tuned for all GCN cards and future releases will bring additional free performance to the table.

Important: Current driver MUST be uninstalled before updating to AMD Catalyst™ 14.1 Beta driver. For detailed instructions on how to correctly uninstall or install the AMD Catalyst Software Suite, please refer to the following support resources:

Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta Driver for Windows

Support for the following new AMD Desktop APU (Accelerated Processors) products:

AMD A10-7850K

AMD A10-7700K

Mantle Beta driver

AMD’s Mantle is a groundbreaking graphics API that promises to transform the world of game development to help bring better, faster games to the PC

Performance gain of up to 45%(versus the DirectX version) for Battlefield 4 on the R9 290 Series

Performance gain of up to 200% (versus the DirectX version) for Star Swarm on the R9 290 Series AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta must be used in conjunction with versions of these applications that support Mantle It is expected that these applications will have future updates to support additional AMD Mantle features

AMD Mantle Beta driver is currently supported on: AMD Radeon™ R9 Series GPUs AMD Radeon™ R7 Series GPUs AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series GPUs AMD Radeon™ HD 8000 Series GPUs AMD A10-7000 Series and AMD A8-7000 Series APUs

​​​​​For additional details please see the AMD Mantle Technology FAQ on amd.com​

Enhanced AMD CrossFire frame pacing – Support for 4K panel and Eyefinity non-XDMA CrossFire solutions (including the AMD Radeon R9 280, 270 Series, 7900 Series, 7800 Series) and Dual Graphics configurations​ ​​​Frame pacing ensures that frames rendered across multiple GPUs in an AMD CrossFire configuration will be displayed at an even and regular pace Supported on 4K panels and Eyefinity configurations Supported on AMD Dual Graphics configurations Supported on DirectX® 10 and DirectX 11 applications​​​



Resolved issue highlights of AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta​​

Resolves ground texture flickering seen in Total War: Rome 2 with high settings (and below) set in game

Resolves flickering texture corruption when playing Call of Duty: Ghosts (multi-player) in the space station level

Ground texture flickering seen in Total War: Rome 2 with high settings (and below) set in game

Flickering texture corruption when playing Call of Duty: Ghosts (multi-player) in the space station level

Blu-ray playback using PowerDVD black screen on extended mode

Streaming VUDU HD/HDX content on Sharp PN-K321 (DP) causes the right-side half to flicker in and out

Black screen happened after wake up the monitor

Full screen issue at rotation in DX9 mode

Video window black screen when using Samsung Kies to play video

Crysis2 negative scaling in outdoor scene

Crysis2 has insufficient CrossFire scaling in some scene

Red Faction: The game has no or negative crossfire scaling with DX9 and DX11

Age of Conan has corruption and performance issues with crossfire enabled

Company of Heroes shadows are corrupted when using crossfire

Resident Evil5 ‘s performance is unstable when display mode set to Window mode

Total War: Shogun 2 flickering menu/text

Frame rate drop when disabling post-processing in 3DMark06

Negative Crossfire scaling with game “The Secret World” in DX11 mode

F1 2012 Crashes to desktop

Tomb Raider Hair Simulation Stutters on CFX

Negative CrossFire scaling experienced in Call of Duty

Battlefield 3 performance drop on Haswell systems

Choppy video playback on 4k Video

VSync ON Tearing with 2×1 Eyefinity SLS CrossFire

Far Cry 3 – Game flickering while changing resolutions

Display corruption and BSOD occurs when extending a display after disabling Multiple GPU SLS array

Flickering seen when enable three 4kx2k panels at the same time

No Video, just a black screen when setting Chrome to run in “High Performance” when playing certain video clips

Image crashed on Starcraft game

Known Issues

Mantle performance for the AMD Radeon™ HD 7000/HD 8000 Series GPUs and AMD Radeon™ R9 280X and R9 270X GPUs will be optimized for BattleField 4™ in future AMD Catalyst™ releases. These products will see limited gains in BattleField 4™ and AMD is currently investigating optimizations for them.

Multi-GPU support under DirectX® and Mantle will be added to StarSwarm in a future application patch

Intermittent stuttering or stability issues may occur when utilizing Mantle with AMD CrossFire™ technology in BattleField 4™ – AMD recommends using the DirectX code path when playing Battlefield 4 with multiple GPUs. A future AMD Catalyst release will resolve these issues

Notebooks based on AMD Enduro or PowerXpress™ technologies are currently not supported by the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4™

AMD Eyefinity configurations utilizing portrait display orientations are currently not supported by the Mantle codepath in Battlefield 4™

AMD Eyefinity technology is not currently supported in the Star Swarm​ application

AMD testing for the AMD Catalyst™ 14.1 Beta Mantle driver has been concentrated on the following products: AMD Radeon™ R9 290X, R9 290, R9 280, R9 270, R7 260X, R7 260, HD 7000 Series, HD 8000 Series, A10-7850K and A10-7700K. Future AMD Catalyst™ releases will include full test coverage for all AMD products supported by Mantle.

Graphics hardware in the AMD A10-7850K and A10-7700K may override the presence of a discrete GPU under the Mantle code path in Battlefield 4™

Frame Pacing for Dual Graphics and non-XDMA configurations above 2560×1600 do not currently work with Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4. An upcoming release will enable support

DX9 Dual graphics is not supported in AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta. An upcoming release will enable support

To download or see the supported video card list, visit AMD web site.

AMD Issue Reporting Form

This driver release incorporates suggestions received through the AMD Issue Reporting Form. To provide us with your feedback, use the appropriate form.