AMD Catalyst 10.12

Christmas present from AMD

AMD's PR exaggerated “Catalyst 10.12 is going to be HUGE" and everyone knows nothing "HUGE" ever comes in the form of driver release. But AMD did pack some nice changes to their mediocre drivers.
From the screenshot above you can see that the irritating drop down menu navigation is FINALLY gone. It is replaced by a categorized pop up list which expands when you hover your mouse over those self explanatory icons . Tree view drop down list is the default view, which is the way catalyst was before they updated it with that hideous drop down menu. Not shown in the picture is the ability to resize the window, which is really useful if you are using low resolution displays. The downside is the interface would always switch back to its default, forgeting your prefered windows size and list display. Every changes is however cosmetic as no additional settings is introduced. Since the previous GUI totally suck balls and push the bar so low till this new interface feels godsend. Not on par with nvidia GUI yet, but its sure a MAJOR step in the right direction.
Among the boring list of bug fixes with no mention of performance boost, lies a surprise unannounced in the release notes. Holidays are upon us and many have a huge library of movies and anime to clear. Of course not every content is graced with HD treatment nor economical to repurchase them. The good news is DXVA playback with SD content that AMD broke ages ago is finally working again. Not only isnt it mentioned, the hardware decoder seems to be the same version number too. I'm really curious how AMD totally doesnt acknowledge this issue to suddenly fix it suddenly. Every programmer knows its a bitch when working with a large program, therefore i will place my bet that AMD break and "repair" this feature unintentionally.
For HD5XXX users, AMD still didn't add in the new anti aliasing shader, which is promised and enabled in a previous hotfix driver. Not a major deal breaker for me since creating application profile in catalyst is still too much of a hassle. Also this driver apparently doesn't have WHQL certification as windows warned of unsigned driver during installation. Of course such trivial things isnt stopping us from getting the best catalyst driver release this year.
Grab them here:http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx
And take a look at the "incomplete" release notes here:http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst1012ReleaseNotes.aspx