The latest Catalyst drivers for the ATI Radeon graphics cards have been released by Advanced Micro Devices for both Windows and Linux. The company announced that the new drivers are capable of providing up to 20 percent better performance
in the 3DMark Vantage benchmark and also up to 15 percent frame rate increase in some of the current games.
According to AMD, Information Center enhancements have been added to the Catalyst Control Center in the new release. This version of the Information Center will display full hardware information for every physical graphics accelerator that is installed on the system. Another new feature of Catalyst 8.7 is the support for
new Linux operating systems.
When it comes to performance, the new drivers are expected to provide more in the 3DMark Vantage tests, when the Performance Preset is enabled on a system configured with a single ATI Radeon HD 36xx or ATI Radeon HD 34xx card. Perhaps this will make disappointments surface, as improvements for the Radeon HD 48xx cards would have been expected.
Gamers have reasons to be happy with the new drivers, as performance increases have been marked for most of the highly demanding games on the market. Also, all the ATI Radeon HD 48xx, 36xx, and 34xx cards will benefit from the new improvements. Company of Heroes on DirectX10 marks 3 to 12 percent more performance on systems using one of the named cards. Lost Planet scores 4 to 15 percent performance increase when under DirectX10, and up to 80 percent increase under DirectX9. Call of Duty 4 on DirectX9 will also register improvements on specific maps when an ATI Radeon HD 48xx card is used.
As every new Catalyst release does, a substantial number of fixed issues are delivered as well, both under Windows Vista and Windows XP. Nevertheless, there are also issues that will appear at certain moments when using the Catalyst 8.7 drivers. A full list of them can be found on
AMD's site, while the drivers are available for download on Softpedia.com as well.
Catalyst 8.7 Drivers for Windows XPATI Catalyst 8.7 Software Suite XP32ATI Catalyst 8.7 Display Driver XP32ATI Catalyst 8.7 Control CenterATI Catalyst 8.7 WDM DriverMicrosoft UAA HDMI Audio Class DriverATI Catalyst 8.7 HDMI Audio DriverATI Catalyst 8.7 Software Suite XP64Catalyst 8.7 Drivers for Windows VistaATI Catalyst 8.7 Software Suite Vista32ATI Catalyst 8.7 Display Driver Vista32ATI Catalyst 8.7 Control Center Vista32ATI Catalyst 8.7 Avivo PackageATI Catalyst 8.7 HydraVisionATI Catalyst 8.7 Software Suite Vista64ATI Catalyst 8.7 Display Driver Vista64
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