On the heels of Nvidia's performance-oriented GeForce update, AMD has released its own beta driver bringing a handful of frame rate and latency enhancements. Among the speed improvements is a 15% gain when using high MSAA settings in Crysis 3, which is running a public multiplayer beta through February 12, allowing players to explore two maps ("Museum" and "Airport") as well as two game modes ("Crash Site" and "Hunter").
With Crysis 3 expected to launch in North America on February 19, AMD has promised that additional performance improvements will be delivered in future updates to the Catalyst 13.2 beta. For now, other title-specific performance improvements include up to a 50% boost when playing the recently released DmC Devil May Cry with a single graphics card and up to 10% better frame rates when running Crysis 2 with a CrossFire setup.
The latest Catalyst build also partially addresses a frame latency issue found by The Tech Report in a GTX 660 Ti versus HD 7950 review last December. Although AMD's GPU delivered decent average frame rates, it produced regular latency spikes when rendering frames that yielded choppier gameplay than might be expected. The site published a follow-up last week showing the improvements made in the beta drivers when playing Skyrim, Borderlands 2 and Guild Wars 2. Grab your copy of the new Catalyst or GeForce release below:
Catalyst 13.2 beta 3 (release notes)
Desktop/mobile: Windows Vista/7/8 32/64-bit | Linux (Red Hat/SUSE/OpenSUSE/Ubuntu) 32/64-bit
GeForce 313.95 beta (release notes)
Desktop: Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista/7/8 32-bit | Windows Vista/7/8 64-bit
Mobile: Windows Vista/7/8 32-bit | Windows Vista/7/8 64-bit