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About a week ago, we began hearing rumours that AMD was preparing a new special edition driver, much like last year's ‘Omega' update. However, it turns out that something much bigger was planned, Catalyst Control Centre is dead. AMD is now introducing ‘Radeon Software', which will completely overhaul the driver experience for Radeon GPU users.
The Catalyst Control Centre first launched back in 2002 but now it seems that it is time for a change. AMD recently set up the Radeon Technologies Group, which has been working on Radeon Software: Crimson Edition. Big name updates like ‘Crimson Edition', will be yearly driver releases, though there will be plenty of incremental updates in-between, which will follow the familiar X.XX numbering scheme, for example, the first Crimson update will be known as version 15.11.
Aside from the big name change, there will be a completely overhauled user interface, performance improvements and some new features. First off, there is a new ‘Game Manager' tab, which allows you to view your games on one screen and set graphics settings from the driver. Overdrive has some changes too, allowing you to configure unique over-clocking settings on a per game basis.
Eyefinity users can now set up their displays with just one click and things like VSR, FreeSync or GPU scaling can all be configured under the ‘Display' tab.
AMD plans to have WHQL driver releases each year and the software will check itself for updates every two weeks. However, you can just do things manually if you want to. Expect Radeon Software: Crimson Edition to launch soon.
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KitGuru Says: It looks like AMD is kicking things up a notch with its drivers this year. What do you guys think of the announcement today?
So, will there be Crimson software edition and OMEGA side by side or do they merge too?
About time, they still have not sorted out the windows 10 drivers – I get a lockup under load all the time now, never had this issue under 7, read the forums and a lot of people complaining and the lack of response from ATI means that after 10 years of their cards my next one is going to be an Nvidia
nVidia isn’t much better, I’ve actually had BSODs with a Quadro card and issues with multi-monitor displays forcing me to roll back to Win 8.1. That’s inexcusable on a professional graphics card.
Crimson is OMEGA renamed . Catalyst Control Center is replaced by Radeon Software, and every year it’ll have a Crimson update which will include a host of new fixes/features.
Thanks for the clarification. The AMD naming scheme was alwasy confusing. Easy to misunderstand! I mistook ‘Radeon Software’ for the new sub-division under the newly formed Radeon Technologies Group and Crimson as the main suite.
—So to sum it up—-
-> Catalyst Control Center (CCC) = Radeon Software
-> OMEGA = Crimson (Edition)
From the sound of your comment I assume you went to Windows 10? The OS is a complete bugfestival. No matter the hardware or vendor, the OS is just a big mess. I have never seen such an unstable release of Microsoft before. Not even ME or Vista were that bug infested(!).
This will not get better if Microsoft messes up the automatic driver update further. Rolled back graphics, audio and chipset drivers can kill any system. I am curious to see how this new Radeon Software masters this troublesome part.
Correct. I concur that its a change in the works since, and to coincide with, the latest Radeon division restructuring, as you mentioned. Definitely helps with familiarizing ones self with a software, especially if its a first timer with radeon. However one of the cool things about this is they recreated it with a programming language Qt (which I’m not familiar with, but from what I’ve gathered its a hell of a lot faster than .net, which they used for CCC and is also Linux portable) making it much more efficient.
My problem is that I was hoping for more driver improvements than GUI. I might be missing something however, from the sounds of it, it sounds like this is the going to be the only, albeit major, change to the drivers this Crimson (OMEGA) round.
Meanwhile my experience with W10 has been absolutely flawless.
Oh, and I had to wait for SP1 before I could even use Vista due to HORRIBLE software compatibility and driver problems…..
I won’t deny your claim to be uninvolved in the errors. Yet uncountable other Win10 users haver serious troubles. Vista had issues with the missing drivers and needed at least 2GB RAM to work fluent. That was very much back at the time. The basic functions did work from the beginning. As soon as newer directX9/10 graphics cards came out, all was fine. Especially onboard graphics and iGPUs / APUs were troubled by this.
Windows 10 does have less graphical requirements, because Microsoft lowered them with their minimalistic flat design. Now the issues of the OS are random bugs and critical design flaws. My view goes onto WiFi connection loss, random crashes into black and bluescreens, infinite boot loop and many more.
With all the headaches, the new AMD Radeon Software Center might not be unfazed by all of this. If troubles appear with this Software, the user will not know if it is caused by AMD or Microsoft.
Sorry it just seemed like you were speaking for everyone. Good to know you weren’t. 😉
Sean I run an AMD PC and an Intel/nVidia notebook user I have to say amd’s drivers are more stable than nVidias. Got more crashes and bugs with the gtx950m than with crossfired r9 290s
to be honest it can vary from user to user, ive got a 270x and ive had no issues under windows 10. On the other hand ive heard tons of issues with windows 10 drivers for nvidia users so its hard to tell.
its going to be like the Omega patch last year this is just one of the features coming within teh update there will be driver updates and such aswell.
Hopefully this leads to a more structured and positive driver support proposition from them.
I do hope so. What worries me is this is the one their touting. Last years OMEGA had a ton of features users of GCN really appreciated (I’m still on an HD5850, I personally didn’t get too many optimizations, but am looking at current gen cards and will upgrade again with arctic island) however they haven’t said anything about it, still worrisome.