AMD (NYSE: AMD) is set to roll out a comprehensive update to its Catalyst software suite with an upcoming version called Catalyst Omega (version 14.50). The update is said to bring significant improvements for both the vendor’s desktop and mobile GPUs as well as APUs.

Virtual Super Resolution

One of the highlighted features is Virtual Super Resolution, which renders visuals at a higher resolution and then scales the content down to match the resolution of your monitor. The goal with this technology is to bring 4K-like visuals to users on full-HD displays. If this sounds familiar, it is because Nvidia rolled out a similar feature dubbed Dynamic Super Resolution with the GeForce 900 series.

VSR uses supersampling anti-aliasing, which while improving the final image quality, takes a toll on the GPU as it has to render content at far higher resolutions than the native resolution of your display. For instance, if you were using VSR to render content at four times the native resolution on a full-HD monitor, the performance draw on the video card would be the same as rendering the game in 4K. As such, the feature is limited to high-end models, including the R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290 and R9 285.

The supported VSR modes include:

Multimedia features

Another new feature AMD is touting with Catalyst Omega is Fluid Motion Video, which utilizes the GPU in smoothing out the playback when reading content off Blu-Ray discs. The feature is targeted at low-power APUs, and will be available on all 7×00 A-series APUs with a TDP of 35W and higher. Standalone video cards that have this feature enabled include the R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290, R9 285, R7 260X and R7 260. There is a software component to the feature as well, with users required to use Cyberlink’s PowerDVD 14.

Also included in the Catalyst Omega update is Contour Removal, a feature that aims to remove  compression artifacts from compressed videos without affecting the overall quality of the video. The feature will be available on all Athlon APUs and 7×00 A-series APUs with a TDP of 25W and higher, and the following video cards: R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290, R9 285, R7 260X and R7 260.

AMD is bringing 1080P Detail Enhancement — which improves clarity of compressed and low resolution content when played back on a full-HD display — to all of its 7×00 A-Series APUs. There’s also FullHD to UltraHD Video, which enhances full-HD content when displayed on a 4K monitor. The feature is making its way to all AMD 7×00 A-Series APUs and Radeon R7 260 and higher.

The new software driver includes support for Dell’s 5K monitor, the Dell UP2715K, which has a resolution of 5120×2880 at 60Hz. Any AMD GPU with two DisplayPort 1.2 ports will now work with the 5K monitor.

AMD is also touring performance improvements on APUs by as much as 29% and discrete GPUs by 19%. Other highlights with the update dev-focused features like enabling game capture and Twitch streaming for Mantle-enabled titles, OpenCL 2.0 support, addition of power profiling to AMD CodeXL 1.6, improvements to the AMD GPU Perfstudio, HSA Runtime and more.

The update will be rolling out later this week.

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ARM today announced its latest graphics IP which includes three new GPUs as well as new video and display processors. With the introduction of ARM’s new Mali 8 series graphics IP, the company put a bigger focus on power efficiency and is looking to target products across a broad spectrum of capabilities and power envelopes. ARM’s announcement today introduces the Mali-T860, Mali-T830 and Mali-T820 GPUs as well as the Mali-V550 and Mali-DP550.

The new Mali graphics IP, as shown above, is part of ARM’s effort to make their graphics solutions even more efficient than their predecessors. This includes the ARM Mali-T800 series which is a successor to the currently available Mali-T700 series. The first of this graphics IP, the Mali-T800 series is designed to be more for the mid-range of devices as opposed to the high-end, however, ARM did state that the ARM Mali-T860 is still a high performance part.

The Mali-T860 is, according to ARM, a much more efficient GPU than the previous generations stating that it is 45% more efficient at certain tasks than the T628, which was the company’s high performance part before the T700 series cam out. It also has 16 scalable shader cores, meaning that you don’t have to fully implement all cores in the design, but I suspect most that choose to license it will go for the 16 core design.

ARM also claims support for 4K, which very likely means the ability to display 4K pixels and maybe 4K UIs without much more than that. Because realistically, no mobile platform is really capable of 4K gaming right now unless they upscale 1080P content. Additionally, the GPU will support OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenCL 1.2, but no Open CL 2.0. There is also going to be DirectX 11.1 support, but no DirectX 11.3 or 12.0 support. And last but not least, they also will support renderscript compute for all of the Android implementations. The lack of OpenCL 2.0 may be due to the fact that these are designed to be more mainstream or because OpenCL 2.0 is so new, but the lack of DirectX 12 is a bit interesting since this GPU will be in products sometime next year, which is around the time of Windows 10 (and DX12) launch.

That brings us to the Mali-T830 and T820 which are ARM Mali’s even more power efficient GPUs designed for the mainstream performance. These GPUs essentially carry many of the same capabilities of the T860 but with only four shader cores and no 4K support. They also lack an advanced tiling unit, which the T860 has. With these ARM Mali graphic chips, the company claims 50% better areal efficiency and 55% faster performance over the T622 generation of ARM Mali graphics, which preceded the current T720 generation of Mali GPUs.

Last but not least, are ARM’s Mali Video and Display processors which are designed to bring ARM’s goal of efficiency all the way from the GPU to the display processor. The way that they achieve this is with their new Mali-V550 and Mali-DP550 processors each designed for high efficiency operation in conjunction with the ARM Mali 800 series GPUs.  As you can see from the slides below, the Mali-V550 also brings HEVC (h.265) encode and decode capability to ARM’s video processors and brings the ability to support multiple standards. The V550 also scales from doing 1080 at 60 FPS with a single video care to 4K at 120 FPS with 8 video cores and it supports multiple simultaneous encode and decode streams.

The Mali-DP550 further enables a lot of what the T860 and V550 can do with improved power and memory efficiency as well as the ability to scale to 4K resolution. ARM is clearly ready to hop aboard the 4K bandwagon, with Qualcomm leading the charge. They also support 3rd party display differentiation which allows for 3rd party/SoC vendor IP into the Mali display pipeline.

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Nvidia’s new 340.52 drivers (that enable the new SHIELD tablet features) have a feature that disable GPU PhysX in dual-GPU systems that have one non-Nvidia card, according to Nvidia’s own release notes for the drivers in question.

According to Nvidia, GPU PhysX is disabled when a non-Nvidia GPU is present because the company says a high quality experience in such a scenario can’t be guaranteed. Such a combination would preclude users from utilizing using key features such as high performance communication between CUDA and the graphics API. Unfortunately for many users Nvidia says it has not found a full-proof way to detect whether or not the non-Nvidia GPU is truly idle throughout the application’s lifetime, so CPU PhysX is used instead ensuring a quality experience for all

This statement by Nvidia is further supported by the fact that it has also instituted its own limitation on Nvidia  GPUs in terms of what is allowed to support PhysX. From here on out, any Nvidia GPU that runs PhysX will have to be a GeForce 8-series and later with a minimum of 256 MB of dedicated GPU memory, which really shouldn’t be much of an issue unless a dedicated PhysX card (aka relic) is present in the system. Nvidia introduced CUDA with the 8-series so it seems logical at least an 8-series card would be required in order to run PhysX (CUDA enabled) on the GPU.

The right move by Nvidia?

It would be a fairly nefarious move for Nvidia to be disabling a feature simply because two GPUs from different vendors are installed, which in the past has caused some issues, but never really forced certain features to be disabled. As such, we reached out to Nvidia to get a better idea of why the company is doing this and why slow downs in PhysX enabled scenes may occur in a GPU-vendor agnostic setup.

This issue should not arise in systems that have Intel GPUs that switch between onboard and dedicated (Nvidia) because of Nvidia’s Optimus technology. This should only really affect people that are running two desktop boards or possibly someone that has a system with an AMD APU and an Nvidia GPU and the APU does not switch off when the Nvidia GPU is installed and enabled (even though it should).

In the Bright Side labs, testing is under way to further investigate this issue to see if it happens on AMD APU systems or systems with Intel integrated GPUs. Nvidia says it is currently working on a resolution for this issue.

While some AMD users may raise concerns over this, the amount of people that have a system with two GPUs from different vendors and care about GPU PhysX are probably less than a few dozen or hundred. Some may see this as a penalty for running an AMD GPU alongside an Nvidia GPU, but realistically there’s a reason why no system builders sell mixed systems with Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

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The device is so good that it leaves a lasting impression... but you have to use it to build your profile. It only gets better as the time passes by...

Starting today, NIA finally has 64-bit driver support. According to Dr. Michael Schuette, “The migration to the Vista 64 environment with the unified ver. 2.0 software suite required a complete recoding of the human interface device library”. The company decided to add the 64-bit executable into brand new unified driver package, supporting 32-bit Windows XP and both versions of Vista.
You can download drivers from here. Given the fact that my old review never saw the light of day on previous publications, I am working on a new review, hopefully done by next week.
If you have NIA device, you can grab the drivers here. If you don’t have the device, I wholeheartedly advise you to reconsider your shopping list – the device now sells for only $116.99 (after  $20.00 MIR) over at Newegg.

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