There’s a minor update on the progress towards a Catalyst 15.5 Beta release from AMD, but the statement doesn’t offer anything in the way of an ETA.
“AMD is committed to improving performance for the recently-released Project CARS and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt,” the company writes. “We will release AMD Catalystâ„¢ 15.5 Beta on our website as soon as it is available.”
Last Saturday, AMD seemed fairly confident (though not definite) that the drivers would be released this week. That may still be the case, but a “done when it’s done” type update being released on a Wednesday doesn’t inspire a huge amount of hope that they’ll pop up in the next couple of days.
An alleged leaked version of the 15.5 Beta has shown up on the Guru3D forums, and appears to be legitimate enough that various people there have installed it and reported slight gains (in Project Cars, at least.) Whether this is actually the finalised beta release version of the driver, however, is anybody’s guess.
Today’s AMD statement also contains an official endorsement of the Witcher 3 ‘Hairworks’ fix for AMD cards. The process involves creating a profile for witcher3.exe in Catalyst Control Center, then seting Tessellation Mode to “Override application setting” and selecting either 2x, 4x, 8x or 16x.
2x makes hair look a bit rubbish, and 16x is the most demanding; but 4x-8x can apparently make the Hairworks work pretty well on AMD hardware, without much performance cost. Slightly bizarre, but welcome nonetheless.
