AMD Radeon Crimson ReLive Edition Driver Overview - Open Capture and Analytics Tool & HDMI Detection

HDMI Signal Detection 

Now I honestly did not know that people would ever need it, as hey ... if you get a black screen when you connect something to your TV HDMI, the first thing you'd do is to change your HDMI cable yes ? Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition will allow automatic detection of bad HDMI cables with signal detection and fallback that will allow for less black/static screens due to cable issues with Radeon products. If a bad cable is detected and the display cannot be lit, the algorithm will step through other resolutions and refresh rates until it can find a supported configuration for the bad cable and then notify the user of the issue. 

VP9 Decode Acceleration

This feature I am happy about, as the world advances towards 4K / Ultra HD content to our televisions the file size of content gets bigger as well, hence you need a proper en/decoder. H.265 and VP9 support 4K and heck even 8K content. H.265 was developed as the ‘HEVC’ (High Efficiency Video Coding) format jointly by the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). But they ask mucho dinero for the HEVC license, e.g. the ability to use the CODEC. And that is different for VP9. 
 

 
VP9 is open source and royalty free. It was actually developed by Google as a successor to VP8. Google has integrated support into the Chrome browser and YouTube. And that is where you'll spot a nice and large advantage.  Starting with the new driver VP9 Decode is hardware accelerated. 

Open Capture and Analytics Tool

AMD often mimics a lot of what NVIDIA does.  So in this case NV has FCAT, and AMD now all of the sudden is introducing something called OCAT, short for Open Capture and Analytics Tool. This open source benchmarking tool.
 

 
We have not been able to test OCAT and thus its reliability just yet as we have received the software days before release, and time was too short to test it. We'll check it out and inform you more later on.