14 DAY TRIAL // This has been a weekend for gamers, especially for those who have been attending this year's edition of QuakeCon, which was hosted at the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine, Texas from August 13 to August 16. The event has been sponsored by a series of industry players, including the world's largest chip makers, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. Taking the opportunity to gain some more momentum for its latest line of computer CPUs and graphics processing units, AMD has announced the launch of its next-generation graphics drives, coming in the form of the Catalyst 9.8 suite of drivers.
Unfortunately, although the new set of drivers have been already announced by the Sunnyvale, California-based chip maker at the QuakeCon event, they are still to be made available on the company's website. However, Ian McNaughton, senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD, has been kind enough to post some early download links for the new series of drivers, which are now available through his blog site. In addition, we also have some early details on the performance levels achieved by the new Catalyst suite.
According to the blog post, the performance gains that have been enabled by AMD's new set of drivers are in the range of 50% in Far Cry 2, while fans of games such as Battleforge, Company of Heroes, Crysis, H.A.W.X., S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky and World in Conflict can also expect some noteworthy performance increases, using AMD's graphics processing units and the new graphics driver series. The new suite will purportedly increase performance in both conventional CrossFire setups and the single-board Radeon HD 4870 X2.
We are still waiting for AMD to post the official download links on its website and we will try to update on the story as soon as these details become available, so please stay tuned.
Update: It looks like the new Catalyst suite of graphics drivers have just been made available and we can now provide you with the download links. Be sure to click the one that is compatible with your operating system.
AMD ATI Catalyst Suite 9.8 for Windows XP 32-bit AMD ATI Catalyst Suite 9.8 for Windows XP 64-bit AMD ATI Catalyst Suite 9.8 for Windows Vista/7 32-bit AMD ATI Catalyst Suite 9.8 for Windows Vista/7 64-bit