In our earlier report questioning if R9 290X is clocking down too much we already tried to explain that heat versus RPM is the most common denominator for the reported code clock down issues. The AMD Catalyst 13.11 BETA 9.2 released hours ago should be fixing that issues as AMD identified that there’s variability in fan speeds across AMD R9 290 series boards. This variability in fan speed translates into variability of the cooling capacity of the fan-sink.
The flexibility of AMD PowerTune technology enables us to correct this variability in a driver update. This update will normalize the fan RPMs to the correct values. The correct target RPM values are 2200RPM for the AMD Radeon R9 290X ‘Quiet mode’, and 2650RPM for the R9 290.
If you’re working on stories relating to R9 290 series products, please use this driver as it will reduce any variability in fan speeds. The AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta9.2 driver is available from the following link.
Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta9.2 Driver for Windows
- Call of Duty®: Ghost - Improves anti-aliasing performance, and updates the AMD CrossFire™ profile
- AMD Radeon™ R9 290 Series - PowerTune update to reduce variance of fan speed / RPM
- Resolves intermittent crashes seen in legacy DirectX® 9 applications
Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta8 Driver for Windows
- Includes all Feature Highlights of the AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta7
- Resolves intermittent crashes experienced with Battlefield 4 on Windows 8 based systems
Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta7 Driver for Windows
- Includes all Feature Highlights of the AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta6
- Increases AMD CrossFire™ scaling up to an additional 20% for Battlefield 4
Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta6 Driver for Windows
- Includes all Feature Highlights of AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta
- Includes support for the new products:
- AMD Radeon™ R9 290X
- AMD Radeon R9 290
- Performance improvements
- Batman: Arkham Origins - improves performance up to 35% with MSAA 8x enabled
- Total War™: Rome 2 - improves performance up to 10%
- Battlefield 3 - improves performance up to 10%
- GRID 2 - improves performance up to 8.5%
- DiRT Showdown - improves performance up to 10%
- Formula 1™ 2013 - improves performance up to 8%
- DiRT 3 - improves performance up to 7%
- Sleeping Dogs - improves performance up to 5%
- Batman: Arkham Origins - improves performance up to 35% with MSAA 8x enabled
- Performance improvements for the AMD APU Series (comparing AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta6 to AMD Catalyst 13.9)
- Luxmark (openCL) - improves performance up to 10%
- Winzip 17.5 (openCL) - improves performance up to 20%
- GRID 2 - improves performance up to 4%
- Battlefield 4 - improves performance up to 5%
- Lef4Dead - improves performance up to 10%
- Automatic AMD Eyefinity Configuration
- Automatic "plug and play" configuration of supported Ultra HD/4K tiled displays
Feature Highlights of The AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta Driver for Windows
- Includes support for the new products:
- AMD Radeon™ R9 280X
- AMD Radeon R9 270X
- AMD Radeon R7 260X
- AMD Radeon R7 250
- AMD Radeon R7 240
- Performance improvements for the AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series in the following games:
- Total War™: Rome 2 - improves performance up to 10%
- Splinter Cell® Blacklist™ - improves performance up to 7% on single GPU and AMD CrossFire™ configurations
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim® - improves performance up to 9%
