AMD Catalyst 15.11.1 Beta Drivers Bring Fallout 4, Black Ops 3, Battlefront Optimizations
AMD's working on a brand new software suite called Radeon Software Crimson Edition to replace its Catalyst Control Center, but in the meantime, the show must go on, as they say. And in the latest act, AMD has made available its Catalyst 15.11.1 drivers in beta form to boost performance in some of the newest games just released.
To be more specific, Catalyst 15.11.1 beta includes "quality and performance optimizations" for Star Wars: Battlefront, Fallout 4 (check out our gameplay and performance review), Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and Assassin's Creed Syndicate. If you're planning to play any of those titles on your Radeon branded GPU, it might be worth rolling the dice on beta drivers.
Of course, there are some caveats and issues that are worth noting. For one, you shouldn't try to install these drivers for AMD products running Apple's Boot Camp platform -- instead, AMD says to contact your manufacturer (Apple) for driver support.
Secondly, here's a look at the known issues associated with this beta release:
To be more specific, Catalyst 15.11.1 beta includes "quality and performance optimizations" for Star Wars: Battlefront, Fallout 4 (check out our gameplay and performance review), Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and Assassin's Creed Syndicate. If you're planning to play any of those titles on your Radeon branded GPU, it might be worth rolling the dice on beta drivers.
Of course, there are some caveats and issues that are worth noting. For one, you shouldn't try to install these drivers for AMD products running Apple's Boot Camp platform -- instead, AMD says to contact your manufacturer (Apple) for driver support.
Secondly, here's a look at the known issues associated with this beta release:
- [80314] Assassin's Creed Syndicate - Game cannot be launched in full screen mode on some laptop systems with an Intel processor and an AMD graphics device
- [80119] Star Wars : Battlefront - Game cannot be launched in full screen mode on some laptop systems with an Intel processor and an AMD graphics device.
- [79824] Call of Duty : Black Ops III - Flickering may be observed when running the game in DirectX 11 mode and with AMD Crossfire enabled
- [59475] Elite: Dangerous - poor performance may be experienced in SuperCruise mode
- [78912] A black screen may be experienced on booting Windows 10 on some systems with switchable graphics - with AMD Radeon HD5000 series graphics cards, when connected to an HDMI monitor
- [99999] Far Cry 4: The game may hang on launch on some AMD Radeon 200 and 300 series products under Windows 7 and Windows 8.1
If you're torn between feeling wary of installing beta drivers and wanting to squeeze the best performance possible out of games like Fallout 4 and Battlefront, two of the most hotly anticipated titles of the year, a compromise would be to hold off for a couple of days to see if the initial wave of gamers complain about any additional issues.
Otherwise, you can throw caution to the wind and grab the drivers in 32-bit form here and in 64-bit form here.
