AMD today released their Catalyst 15.7 drivers for Windows, bringing various new features, along with performance improvements. They also converge their drivers, which had recently been split between their newer offerings and their older cards.
Of greatest importance to gamers, perhaps, will be the addition of CrossFire support for FreeSync. A highly requested feature, it was one of the areas where AMD"s FreeSync lacked compared to NVidia"s offering and, with this release, AMD is seeking to close the gap. This release also brings profile enhancements for CrossFire systems in numerous games.
Another addition is Windows 10 compatibility with full WDDM 2.0 and DirectX 12 support for Radeon HD 7000 and newer cards. This is still termed a technical preview, however, with the official release coinciding with general availability for Windows 10 on 29 July 2015.
Along with performance improvements to all cards in a wide variety of games, the Catalyst 15.7 drivers also bring various new features to older cards. Frame Rate Control allows you to cap your GPU"s output in a range of 55-95fps, while Virtual Super Resolution (VSR) allows games to be rendered at a resolution higher than the monitor"s, and then rescaled for greater graphical fidelity. Both of these features were previously restricted to select R9 200 series cards but will now be available to many of their older offerings, along with their APUs, from the 7400K and above.
FreeSync is AMD"s response to NVidia"s G-Sync and is a variable refresh rate technology based on DisplayPort"s Adaptive Sync protocol, allowing the refresh rate of the monitor to be synchronized with the output from the GPU, thus reducing the screen tearing and stuttering that often result from a disparity between the two.