AMD Confirms Mantle Catalyst Driver Delay – Could be Labeled 14.2 BETA

[javajolt]

DICE had originally planned the launch of their Mantle Catalyst driver 14.1 BETA for late January and should have been available to users by now. However, it seems like AMD has to delay the update to early February (1st-2nd) due to a major bug which was found during the last minutes of the driver roll out. The Mantle Catalyst driver will now be labeled as the Catalyst 14.2 BETA keeping the driver naming scheme in conjunction to the calender. The following update was passed on by TechPowerUp:

AMD now tells us that their teams have been working overnight to fix the driver, and should have their next status update for us by mid-afternoon EST (New York time), later today. TechPowerUp (see Spoiler below)

Spoiler for :

AMD Catalyst Mantle Driver Delayed

by: btarunr

Friday, January 31st 2014 01:00 Discuss As mentioned in our older article from Thursday, AMD discovered a major bug with its Catalyst 14.2 driver at the last minute, which threw a wrench in the works at the company. The driver was originally slated to come out in sync with DICE' update of Battlefield 4 on Thursday. AMD now tells us that their teams have been working overnight to fix the driver, and should have their next status update for us by mid-afternoon EST (New York time), later today.

That update doesn't necessarily mean a driver release at that point in time, and so AMD might be forced to label it Catalyst 14.2 beta, keeping up with its calendar-based driver version naming. Catalyst 14.1 beta was expected to ship the first public distribution of Mantle, AMD's ambitious 3D graphics API to rival Direct3D and OpenGL.

AMD also mentioned a 24 hour exclusive period for press to evaluate the driver before public release, so it looks like your download will be at least 36 hours away.

source:techpowerup

This is hardly a day or two delay by AMD and its better to solve the bugs in the driver then releasing a bugged version which will cause issues to end users. The Mantle Catalyst driver was planned to launch yesterday with Battlefield’s Mantle patch which has already been downloaded by the Battlefield 4 audience yet they will be unable to run the game with the Mantle API renderrer unless the catalyst driver from AMD is rolled out which will take another day or two.

AMD Mantle is an ambitious project which aims to deliver improved performance by fulling utilizing the hardware capabilities by digging deep into the CPU/GPU core. We have already seen the performance impact of Mantle in Battlefield 4 showcasing some impressive results with low to mid-range processors and eliminating bottlenecks on even the high-end Intel HEDT processors.

Mantle Catalyst Driver Supports All GCN Based Products

Update – AMD has just updated through twitter that their upcoming driver would support and enable mantle for all existing and upcoming GCN based products. AMD also assures further optimization with future released of the catalyst driver.

The Mantle Catalyst driver 14.2 BETA will initially feature support for only four GPUs at launch which include the Radeon R9 290X, Radeon R9 290, Radeon R7 260X and the Radeon R7 200 series integrated Kaveri APUs. Kaveri looks more interesting since we have seen upto 50% performance improvement with the Radeon R7 260X and A10-7850K in the official benchmarks. Of course, the press would be able to review the driver release early on and would be given an exclusive 24 hour period to evaluate the features and performance of the 14.2 BETA drivers before they are publicly released.

The WHQL certified version of the driver would be available a month later as previously stated in the leaked slides which may add support for further GPUs which include the Radeon R9 280X, Radeon R9 270X, HD 7000 series, etc. DICE has also stated that they will keep on patching the Mantle API with more improvements in the upcoming releases.

source:wccftech