AMD Announces Radeon Software and Retires Catalyst

AMD will replace its Catalyst driver with ‘Radeon Software’ before the end of 2015. In addition to a new name, the software package has been given a different look, with new functions. The new Radeon Software would also run faster than Catalyst.

The Radeon Software will be subtitled Crimson Edition, which will apply to all versions of the driver released in 2015 and 2016. The version number consisting of the year and month of the driver release is retained.

The most striking innovation in the Radeon Software is the integration of installed games, as AMD has been doing with Raptr for some time, and for which competitor Nvidia uses GeForce Experience. A profile can be chosen per game, with associated graphic settings and possibly overclocking settings for the gpu. Most of the other settings shown in the screenshots were already present in the Catalyst Control Panel.

AMD claims that the new software is ten times faster than the old one. The Radeon Software control panel would only take 0.6 seconds to load, while Catalyst took another eight seconds. How big the difference is in practice remains to be seen; AMD conducted the test on a not very representative HP Pavilion DM1 laptop, which came on the market in 2011 and has an AMD E-350 APU.

Those who want to get started with the Radeon Software will have to wait a little longer, AMD has indicated that it will release the driver ‘before the end of the year’.