The graphics card software which has been in the AMD artillery for the last 13 year and helping it fend off the competition from its rivals Nvidia is set to retire. Catalyst, the old name for the Radeon graphics driver suite will cease to exist by the end of the year. Radeon Software Crimson is the new Radeon graphics driver suite, but there’s much more to it than a fancy new name.
Here’s AMD’s statement regarding the announcement:
This team [The Radeon Technologies Group] is tasked with propeling the industry forward by driving performance/W with new GPUs, creating innovative new technologies, and making sure the software that supports GPUs is world class. We are thrilled to announce that the first output from the Radeon Technologies Group is a re-imagined Software strategy. As the primary way that people interact with our products, our software deserves to be viewed as a top priority among our roadmaps, and going forward that’s exactly what we’re doing.
As you can see, we are putting great focus on software. We have been delivering graphics drivers for the past 20+ years, and during this time the graphics driver evolved way beyond the graphics device driver. It’s more than just a driver. It’s a whole range of software, and we know how important the software experience is to gamers, game developers, professionals, and others who use our products every day.
Now we have user interfaces, libraries, tools, applications, packaged as what we call drivers. This great set of software has evolved into a mini graphics Operating System. With the formation of Radeon Technologies Group, we have decided to call this mini graphics Operating System “Radeon Software”.
This means we will be retiring AMD Catalyst. This marks the end of an era, and the beginning of a new age of immersive computing where we will be surrounded by billions of brilliant pixels that enhance our daily lives in ways we have yet to fully comprehend. The new era starts on November 2nd when we will introduce Radeon Software Crimson Edition.
The change is not just in the name. The company has revamped the overall structure of the software and has been working on it for nearly a year now. The redesigned user interface is modern and far more intuitive. The company said that the software boot has been radically reduced from 8 seconds to now a mere 0.6 seconds. The company said it had received feedback over the years that it was hard to find functions within the Catalyst suite, so it put emphasis in improving discoverability of functions.
With additional features like overclocking each game individually and integration of social media right into the software, the company is looking to make the graphics driver suite more interactive. Different setting categories like Gaming, Video, Display Eyefinity and System have been listed out on the main page to simplify things.
Radeon Software Crimson has a Game Manager which allows one to edit game profiles individually and get those frame rates right for each game. You change things like anti-aliasing method, anisotropic filter settings, and tessellation modes, gamers will have the option of setting individual overclock settings to each game.
Visual presets in the video tab include Home Video, Cinema Classic, Sports and more. The Display setting has been improved allowing you to set-up a multiple display with a very basic setting. You can enable FreeSync, Virtual Super Resolution and GPU scaling, as well as select scaling modes.
The company said that Radeon Software Crimson Edition is the first edition of the software, which will be updated on an annual basis. Not only will the software get updated but with each update the software will get a new shade of red.
No information has been released so as to when will AMD release the software but will launch it before the year ends.
