AMD updates Catalyst beta drivers, reportedly prepping new ‘Fury’ brand to take on GTX Titan

By Joel Hruska

AMD has launched new Catalyst beta drivers with specific improvements for Project Cars and The Witcher 3, and may be prepping an entirely new brand name for its upcoming Radeon with High Bandwidth Memory onboard. The new drivers target two games that have been in the news lately — we covered the dispute over GameWorks in some depth — but the Project Cars situation involved a war of words between the developer (who alleged AMD vanished off the radar and did no testing) and AMD, which generally disputes these allegations.

AMD is claiming performance improvements of up to 10% for The Witcher 3 and up to 17% for Project Cars when used with single-GPU R9 and R7 products. The Witcher 3’s Crossfire performance has also been improved, though AMD still recommends disabling post-processing AA in Crossfire for best visuals.

The GameWorks optimization question

One thing I want to touch on here is how driver releases play into the GameWorks optimization question. When AMD has said it can’t optimize for GameWorks, what that means is that AMD can’t optimize the specific GameWorks function. In other words, in The Witcher 3, AMD can’t really do much to improve HairWorks performance.

AMD can still optimize other aspects of the game that aren’t covered by GameWorks, which is why you’ll still see performance improve in GW-enabled titles. ComputerBase.de took the new drivers for a spin in The Witcher 3 and saw some modest frame rate increases:

Improvements like this often depend on the specific video card settings or options enabled, so the gamut can swing depending on preset options. AMD has published its own optimization guide for The Witcher 3 for users looking to improve game performance.

Upcoming Fiji to be sold as Radeon Fury?

Meanwhile, the rumor mill is predicting AMD won’t brand the upcoming Fiji GPU as an R9 390X, but will instead sell the card as the Radeon Fury. Whether this is accurate is an open question, but it makes some sense — AMD pioneered the use of flagship CPU branding with the Athlon 64 FX back in 2003, and while it’s never had a flagship GPU brand, Nvidia’s Titan demonstrated that there’s clearly a use for such products.

The name “Fury” also has some history behind it. Back when AMD’s graphics division was an independent company, called ATI, its first popular line of 3D accelerators was branded “Rage,” and the Rage Fury was the top-end part. A later chip, the Rage Fury Maxx, actually implemented AFR rendering in hardware, but driver issues and compatibility problems sullied the GPU brand somewhat. When ATI launched the Rage series’ successor, it adopted a new name — Radeon.

Radeon Fury, if true, is a nice callback — and the performance from Fiji is rumored to be furious. At 4,092 cores and an expected 500GB/s of memory bandwidth, AMD’s new GPU is going to be serious competition for Nvidia — including, just possibly, the Nvidia Titan X.