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Update: this bug has been fixed – see here for details.

For X-Plane users with an AMD graphics* card on Windows or Linux: there appears to be a bug in the 13.11 drivers** that cause corruption in HDR mode; the symptoms are square artifacts of missing clouds and missing windshield in aircraft.

If you can run the 13.9 drivers, stick with those; if you have one of the new Rx 290 cards and you must use newer drivers, turn HDR off for now.

These bugs are Win/Lin only – the Mac AMD drivers don’t have this problem.

* AMD seems to have fully rebranded ATI’s GPUs at this point, so I guess I should get used to writing ‘AMD Radeon’.

** The bug could very well be in our code, but since the code worked on old ATI drivers and a number of other driver stacks, it may very well be a regression in the driver itself. We won’t know until it’s fixed.  And even then, maybe we won’t know.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

5 comments on “Catalyst Driver Advisory: 13.11 Breaks HDR, 13.9 Is Okay”

  1. Yah I had this problem awhile ago and reverted back . I thought it might have been a bad install or something

  3. dear Ben,

    Would it be possible to make some better graphic drivers for Mac OSX MAVERICKS as they are for windows..?
    I mean under Windows 7 it uses open GL 4… Under OSX it uses open gl 2.1….
    then performances are a lot better under windows…

    it is so bad for a mac user to play x-plane under windows 7/bootcamp…

    So what’up about those things..??

    Thanx

    1. Hi,

      A few things:

      1. The drivers are made by, well, not us. So I can’t really comment about what can be done with the drivers; I don’t have the source code.

      2. The use of GL 2.1 vs 4 is due to Apple not supporting the compatibility-API – to get GL 4 on Mavericks we need to rewrite a bunch of code. I ahve a blog post I’ll get to later about this, but the short of it is, to get GL 4, apps on OS X have to do more work, and we are doing that work.

      3. The GL version says NOTHING about the actual performance of X-Plane with the driver – that’s a giant distraction. Every feature we need for full speed operation is available via GL2.1 + extensions, available on OS X.

      But that doesn’t mean that the fps gap is okay. If there is a big gap between fps on Windows vs Mac, that is not good.

      There is one thing you can do to help: run the fps test on Mac and Windows with latest drivers on both (Maverick, and latest IHV drivers on Win 7) and send the log.txt with the fps testes to me, along with an Apple system profile. I can then file a performance bug with Apple.

      If you are seeing faster fps on Win than Mac on ATI, I’d definitely like to see it, as the Mac ATI drivers have historically been very fast.
      If you are seeing faster fps on Win than Mac on NV, please note that instancing isn’t working well for us on the NV Mac drivers right now, something we are looking into.

      Cheers
      Ben

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