ATI Catalyst 9.3 Suite Adds Windows 7 Support, Performance Boost

Sunnyvale, California-based AMD announced yesterday the release of its latest pack of graphics drivers with the introduction of the new Catalyst Software Suite 9.3. With the new release the chip maker decided to catch up with its competitor, NVIDIA and release its own support for Microsoft's next-generation operating system, Windows 7. As with every Catalyst Suite release, the new driver pack also provides a number of fixes for known issues and some performance enhancements for various applications, such as Folding at Home or Lost Planet: Colonies.

 

Catalyst Software Suite 9.3 includes the new Radeon display driver 8.591, HydraVision for both Windows XP and Vista, HydraVision Basic Edition (Windows XP only), WDM Driver Install Bundle, Southbridge/IXP driver and the Catalyst Control Center 8.591. The new suite supports both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft's latest operating systems, including the public available Beta version of Windows 7. The latest drivers include support for some of the latest Radeon graphics cards on the market.

 

One of the main features of the new Catalyst Software Suite, comes in the form of the added Windows 7 support. The new Catalyst 9.3 Unified driver delivers full WDDM 1.1 support for Widows 7 on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series, the ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series and the older ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics cards. Also, according to the release notes, the new drivers deliver improved gaming performance under Windows 7, compared to Windows Vista.

 

Additional features include a performance boost for users of the Folding@Home scores, as well as gains of up to 20% on HD 4800 series products and up to 50% on 4600, 4500 and 4300 series products, when using Lost Planet: Colonies. With the new release AMD added a new AMD Display Library SDK with support for 32-bit and 64-bit variants of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux.

 

Available download links are listed below:

 

- ATI Catalyst Suite for Windows XP 32-bit

- ATI Catalyst Suite for Windows XP 62-bit

- ATI Catalyst Suite for Windows Vista/Windows 7 32-bit

- ATI Catalyst Suite for Windows Vista/Windows 7 64-bit