AMD has announced the availability of the Catalyst Omega drivers, marking the beginning of a new driver release schedule for the company and adding new features including Virtual Super Resolution, a technology similar to Nvidia's Dynamic Super Resolution. AMD plans to reveal a major release brimming with new features once per year. However, the majority of Catalyst Omega’s new features aren’t available for Radeon 7000-series graphics cards, nor the current-gen R9 280 and R9 280X.

The AMD Catalyst Omega driver was engineered to take full advantage of the advanced technologies built into AMD’s products that feature GCN Architecture. AMD says that installing the AMD Catalyst Omega driver on select AMD products enables free software upgrades that install automatically and can improve your gaming performance.

For example, buyers of an AMD Radeon R9 290X GPU who download and install the AMD Catalyst Omega driver can realize up to 19% faster gameplay on BioShock Infinite.

Similarly, users of AMD’s advanced APUs like the AMD A10 7850K can achieve up to 29% faster gaming performance on Batman: Arkham Origins.

The new drivers also enable the UltraHD revolution. UltraHD displays demand UltraHD content - but very little content or entertainment is being recorded in 4K at this time. The Omega drivers offer built-in Ultra HD upsampling with frame rate conversion and HD detail enhancement that will convert 1080p videos to near UltraHD quality on 4K displays. AMD's Perfect Picture UltraHD technology strives for "pixel-perfect" images, with Compression Artifact Removal 2, and Frame Rate Conversion for Blu-ray Playback enabling pixel-by-pixel image processing. In addition, when select products are paired together through Dual Graphics with frame pacing enhancements, the powerful gameplay becomes smooth.

Like Nvidia's DSR, VSR renders games above the display's native resolution and then downscales them to fit.

VSR currently works only on Radeon R9 285 and R9 290 series graphics cards, and it supports the modes outlined below.

Nvidia's DSR works on plenty of older GPUs, including the GeForce GTX 400, 500, and 600 series.

AMD says it plans to add support for Radeon R-series cards from the R7 260 up, but only in a "phase 2" driver due in January or February 2015.

For developers, the AMD Catalyst Omega driver update offers features and tools including OpenCL 2.0 Support; TressFX Hair 3.0 renders fur onto "skinned" geometries and; AMD CodeXL Tools, which debug, profile, and analyze applications while providing a real-time display of APU power consumption, core frequency, temperature changes, and voltage levels.

AMD Catalyst updates are focused on improving graphics performance, including enhancements for popular DirectX, Mantle and OpenGL game titles. Every AMD Catalyst driver release undergoes testing. But in addition to increasing their automated testing by ~65% with this release, AMD also welcomed direct feedback from its most critical users on six of the largest PC communities.