The owners of ATI Radeon graphics cards have all the reasons to be joyful. AMD’s graphics unit is getting ready to release its final driver package for this year, already announced a couple of weeks ago. It will include stream support to accelerate applications that tap into the hidden potential of the GPU. As we've learned, the company released the driver to reviewers and plans posting it for download on December 10th.

The main idea behind ATI's Catalyst 8.12 release is a technology similar to that offered by NVIDIA with its CUDA-enabled graphics drivers for some time now. As previously reported, the driver was announced on November 13, when the Catalyst 8.11 became available, and now it is in the hands of reviewers. The new release includes the CAL (Compute Abstraction Layer), a key component of AMD’s Stream technology.

In order to allow users to get the full picture with the capabilities of the driver, AMD added a free stream application, the ATI Avivo Video Converter. The company announced that the video conversion tool had been developed to work with the Radeon 4800- and 4600-series graphics cards. According to AMD, the CAL will accelerate the software by a factor of 17x. For those that do not know, the 8.11 release came with new features but lacked the performance boosts some of the users had been expecting to see.

The package comes with other features as well, including noise reduction for progressive video content, which is able to remove ghosting artifacts while preserving details of the original video, ATI stated. In addition, the usual array of game performance increases for titles such as Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Devil May Cry, Far Cry 2, FEAR, Left 4 Dead, STALKER Clear Sky and Prey are also present in the package. The December release may turn the table in AMD's favor once again, outperforming the enhancements NVIDIA brought to its cards with its latest GeForce drivers.