Brings several performance increases

Jun 16, 2009 09:36 GMT  ·  By

Advanced Micro Devices, the world's second largest vendor of computer processors and graphics processors has just announced the release of its latest Catalyst Driver Suite, version 9.6. As with previous driver releases, the new version has been designed to provide users with a number of performance increases, while also fixing some of the known issues in various applications. Catalyst 9.6 is now ready for download, here at Softpedia, providing you with support for your own Dragon platform, or any other computer systems that are built using the latest Radeon GPUs.

 

According to the release notes, AMD's latest suite of Catalyst 9.6 drivers includes the following:

 

RadeonTM display driver 8.62

HydraVisionTM for both Windows XP and Vista

HydraVisionTM Basic Edition (Windows XP only)

WDM Driver Install Bundle

Southbridge/IXP Driver

CatalystTM Control Center Version 8.62

 

Already available for download, the new drivers will add support for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 users, with a main focus on a select number of GPUs, ranging from the 24xx-series to the latest 4xxx-series. In addition, the new releases also add support for several AMD Multimedia Family GPUs, AMD FireStream GPUs and the latest 3000-series chipsets.

 

The new drivers will also provide users with a number of performance increases in several gaming applications, according to AMD. Testing them on a platform that included a Phenom II 940 processor running at 3GHz, an ASUS M3A79-T(790) motherboard, 4GB of DDR2 RAM and Microsoft's Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64bit operating system, AMD recorded the following performance increases:

 

Company of Heroes – performance gains of up to 25% for the ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series, and performance gains of up to 10% for the ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series

Crysis Warhead – performance gains of up to 11% for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual configuration.

Crysis – performance gains of up to 13% for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual configuration.

World in Conflict – performance gains of up to 30% for high settings that were previously CPU limited with the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series.

 

The new drivers are available for download right here on Softpedia, following the links below:

 

ATI Catalyst 9.6 Driver Suite for Windows XP 32-bit

ATI Catalyst 9.6 Driver Suite for Windows XP 64-bit

ATI Catalyst 9.6 Driver Suite for Windows Vista/Windows 7 32-bit

ATI Catalyst 9.6 Driver Suite for Windows Vista/Windows 7 64-bit