AMD Catalyst 9.12 Hotfix Enables Crossfire Eyefinity & DisplayPort Audio

On a quick note this morning, along with yesterday’s release of the Catalyst 9.12 drivers, AMD has also published a 9.12 hotfix driver that has added a couple of interesting things.

Along with refreshing their line of OpenCL-capable drivers (OpenCL is still not in the mainline driver), AMD has added support for Crossfire Eyefinity. We first saw Crossfire Eyefinity in our Radeon 5970 review, where the feature was enabled solely for the 5970 so that the complete card could be used for Eyefinity. At the time AMD had promised that they would be enabling Crossfire Eyefinity for true Crossfire-paired cards soon, and this is the first step of fulfilling that promise. The need for AMD to whitelist games for Crossfire Eyefinity has not changed, so while it works on Crossfire-paired cards, it still does not work for all games.

The second interesting addition is support for DisplayPort audio. Although we tend to think of DisplayPort as a replacement for DVI rather than HDMI, technically it can serve as a replacement for both. Several of you have been asking us if the 5000 series supported DisplayPort Audio, and we did not have a good answer until now. If you do have a DisplayPort setup that supports audio, then this driver will allow you to finally get audio out of that DisplayPort on your 5000 series card.

On the performance front we have heard that these drivers may offer some respectable performance boosts for the 5000 series, but this isn’t something we’ve had a chance to test. The timing would be good however, since the supply of RV700 cards (4870/4850) have completely dried up, so buying a cheap 4870 in place of a 5700 series card has ceased to be an option.