What's The AMD Catalyst Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Technology Edition?

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 31, 2010
Updated • Feb 14, 2012
Hardware, Tutorials
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22

I regularly check the AMD Catalyst driver download page to see if a new driver version has been released by AMD. When I went there today I saw a second AMD Catalyst Package which I had never seen before. It was listed below the standard Catalyst Software Suite as AMD Catalyst Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Technology Edition. The new driver package has a size of 92 Megabytes, roughly 17 Megabytes larger than the standard Catalyst Software Suite.

No information about the package are available on the page, except for the drivers that are included in the download. The AMD Catalyst Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Technology Edition contains the standard display driver, ATI integrated driver and Catalyst Control Center just like the Catalyst Software Suite. It contains in addition to that the OpenCL Driver which is available as an individual download as well. The size of 16.4 Megabytes is exactly the difference in Megabytes between the standard driver package and the technology edition.

opencl driver accelerated parallel processing

So what's OpenCL then?

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other processors. OpenCL includes a language (based on C99) for writing kernels (functions that execute on OpenCL devices), plus APIs that are used to define and then control the platforms. OpenCL provides parallel computing using task-based and data-based parallelism. Its architecture shares a range of computational interfaces with two competitors, NVidia's Compute Unified Device Architecture and Microsoft's DirectCompute.

OpenCL gives any application access to the Graphics Processing Unit for non-graphical computing. Thus, OpenCL extends the power of the Graphics Processing Unit beyond graphics (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units). OpenCL is analogous to the open industry standards OpenGL and OpenAL, for 3D graphics and computer audio, respectively. OpenCL is managed by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group. (via)

There aren't a lot of applications for standard users. ATI's developer showcase shows a lot of scientific programs though. Currently, it is safe to say that the OpenCL driver is not needed by the majority of users. This might change in the future.

Do you have additional information about the AMD Catalyst Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Technology Edition or the OpenCL driver? Let everyone know in the comments.

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Comments

  1. Eaglenik said on November 1, 2010 at 12:14 am
    Reply

    Thanks for the info Martin, I have been wondering too.

  2. npc said on November 1, 2010 at 12:44 am
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    Second to last paragraph, “There do not…”, is not grammaticality correct.

    1. NGdriver said on November 18, 2010 at 11:52 am
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      You mean grammatically incorrect.

      1. tlk said on November 22, 2010 at 1:53 am
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        lol

  3. fdskjds said on November 1, 2010 at 3:06 pm
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    A thing designed to confuse the user for sure.
    Why they simply don’t merge with the normal download omg?

    1. Martin said on November 1, 2010 at 3:32 pm
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      The core problem with the addition is the lack of information on AMD’s part.

  4. Freddy said on November 1, 2010 at 8:24 pm
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    Is “Catalyst the user panel”, the device drivers, or the combination?

    I have a Celeron motherboard with twin Radeon 9250’s on board, and it’s fine for nearly everything, but has terrible difficulty playing videos, even from the hard drive. I installed the latest “Catalyst” (10-10_xp32_dd_ccc_enu.exe) and the device drivers still say they are from 2006. This may be the best there is for this board, but it’s sure hard to tell.

  5. Jyo said on November 2, 2010 at 7:06 am
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    Freddy: Did you uninstall the old drivers before installing the new one?

    1. Freddy said on November 2, 2010 at 11:31 am
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      Nope. The instructions didn’t ask me to. I suppose it will just use a vanilla Microsoft driver if I do that? And actually boot? So then I can re-run the Catalyst install?

      1. Martin said on November 2, 2010 at 12:18 pm
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        It is probably best to clean all old drivers first and reboot the machine afterwards. Windows usually offers generic drivers. Once the system boots install the ATI Catalyst drivers again to see if it makes a difference.

  6. Bjarne said on November 5, 2010 at 6:23 pm
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    “gives any application access to the Graphics Processing Unit for non-graphical computing” means it’s basically the ATI/AMD version of NVidia’s CUDA which allows the GPU’s processing power to be used for other stuff than graphics, eg. for physics calculations (through PhysX in that case). That can lessen the load on the computer’s CPU

  7. Ron said on November 25, 2010 at 5:53 pm
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    Everything found in AMD Catalyst, plus the OpenCL driver Users can still grab all of the individual AMD Catalyst components as well (which will also include the OpenCL driver as well)

    Highlights of the AMD Catalyst Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Technology Edition 10.10&up Windows release include:
    Introduction of AMD HD3D Technology

    *Blu-ray 3D support

    •This release of AMD Catalyst provides support for Blu-ray 3D playback
    •Requires Blu-ray 3D player software, 3D supported display and 3D Stereoscopic glasses*
    •Supported on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 Series GPUs

    Stereo 3D gaming support

    •This release of AMD Catalyst provides support for Stereo 3D gaming via 3rd party middleware from Dynamic Digital Depth (DDD) and iZ3D
    •Requires 3D supported display and 3D Stereoscopic glasses*
    •Supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5000™ Series and AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series GPUs

    Video accleration for HD WMV video content

    * This release of AMD Catalyst provides video acceleration support for WMV HD (Microsoft video codec) under Windows 7
    * Supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series of products

    Enahnced Dynamic Contrast video controls

    * This release of AMD Catalyst enhances the Dynamic Contrast setting found in the Catalyst Control Center by adding support for histogram based detection

    Information was found on various websites.

  8. EndUser said on November 26, 2010 at 5:23 pm
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    Just adding my 2 pennies, I think the APP drivers helps GPU intensive apps run concurrently without crashing. I have an ATI 5870, the usually (non-APP) 10.11 ATI driver crashes (after a few seconds) when I run a 3d game (CoD Black ops in windowed mode) along with running a flash based (TV stream) on firefox. Symptoms are: Game hangs momentary (which I then am forced to close), flash player crashes and ATI driver recovers from a crash.

    With the APP drivers installed, this concurrent usage of my GPU seem to run both apps smoothly without crashing. Thanks ATI for the new APP drivers. Things work better now. (Mind you I have not exhaustively tested this! Just a
    over an hour of game play while streaming TV). Things use to crash within a few minutes of running the two apps together.

    1. JD said on January 28, 2011 at 11:05 am
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      Thanks for your 2¢. i was wondering abt this and I also have the same gpu and stream on my big screen through it while some other gpu intensive thing on the other. I have noticed , though when i play a bd movie in PowerDVD10 ultra player now my gpu shows zero use through out the whole movie. not sure if it is connected and cyberlink corp can not respond to this adequately at all. so far they dont know what i am saying. I use afterburner 2.0 and have the graph showing gpu use and fps and it works . non blu ray dvd show action and appropriate fps60 or 24 depending how i have it set. so it works. i usually use my stand alone blu ray player but i sometimes just keep the one in my computer active and check to see if things are correct and since adding the APP drivers i notice this anomaly, if it is unusual. i would have thought the gpu would be more active for blu ray play back, no more since adding APP but getting 0fps and 0% activity for the whole movie does not seem right. no comments from amd or cyberlinnk so far

  9. Christopher said on December 2, 2010 at 5:17 am
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    Is there any program or games to day that use
    Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Technology

  10. Anonymous said on December 4, 2010 at 3:15 am
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    Thanks for the info… was wondering why the 2 versions myself. Still don’t know why they just auto update drivers.

  11. Carl said on December 8, 2010 at 10:47 pm
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    So with all these wonderful things that this “APP technology” does the question still remains, why on earth is amd even continuing to release the drivers/catalyst without it?

    1. Loric said on December 18, 2010 at 5:43 pm
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      B/C some people have the i7 with 8 cores and realy dont nead thier GP doing any extra work…. and with 6-12 Gigs of mem running at 1600 mhz the pc screams…

  12. Matias said on December 17, 2010 at 10:55 pm
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    It would be cool if the next version of Photoshop utilized this in order to process renderings faster. That would rock.

  13. Anonymous said on January 8, 2011 at 1:29 pm
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    how do you know that your graphics card is app tho

  14. TerryBear said on March 2, 2011 at 5:51 am
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    CyberLink’s PowerDirector 9 Ultra64 can use this technology. That’s why I came to this discussion.

  15. Tony Wallace said on June 28, 2011 at 12:06 pm
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    Yes , prog CyberLink PowerDirector ..it offers Smart Video Rendering Technology (SVRT), and is optimized for NVIDIA CUDA technology, AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing technology, Intel Core family processors, and AMD multi-core central process units.

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