About six weeks ago, AMD announced the formation of a new organization within the company that has a laser focus on the vertical integration of all things graphics. The Radeon Technologies Group encompasses a team that is able to capture all the major inflection points in the visualization and gaming industries like DirectX 12 and Virtual Reality – and is led by graphics industry veteran and architect, Raja Koduri.
The team is tasked with propelling the industry forward by driving performance with new GPUs, creating new technologies, and making sure the software that supports GPUs is world class. AMD has now announced that the first output from the Radeon Technologies Group is a re-imagined Software strategy.
AMD says in a statement,
“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. 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.“
Given that AMD sees Catalyst as more than just driver software, it’s basically not a packaged suite that includes Gaming Evolved, Freesync and Eyefinity. Remnants of Catalyst can be seen through its control centre. It’s been a long time coming for AMD to provide a significant update given that everyone’s hot on the heels of game sharing and posting straight to social media with relative ease and seamless navigation.
The change is all-encompassing. We’ve re-designed and re-architected what was previously known as AMD Catalyst Control Center (CCC), and named it Radeon/FirePro Settings. With the new design, we focused on experience, form and function. You’ll see how the new Radeon/FirePro Settings has a modern user interface that is simple and clean, is intuitive to use, and has a significantly faster start up than its predecessor. It also has new features:
Game Manager
Video Quality presets
Social Media integration
Simplified EF setup
System notifications tab
To summarize, AMD Catalyst is retiring its long life and now we’re going to see a complete overhaul from AMD through their Radeon Software. Radeon Software represents the breadth and depth of Radeon Technologies Group’s Software focus. The forthcoming update will be called Radeon Software Crimson Edition.
Radeon Software Crimson Edition will be available for everyone to download before the end of the year, and AMD will be sharing more details in the coming weeks. With AMD placing their expertise on Direct X 12 and with Windows 10, this could be a game changer. How fast will it load ? AMD says Radeon Crimson will load 10 times faster than Catalyst. Given that AMD hasn’t given a release date and says it will be expected before the end of the year, Crimson can be expected by December.
