14 DAY TRIAL // Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices announced yesterday the introduction of its new ATI Catalyst 10.2 drivers for the company line of Radeon products. Although much of the information regarding the new drivers has been available since yesterday, the download availability of the new drivers has been delayed for a while. Fortunately, the company kept its promise and has now made these drivers available to the general public, ready to provide Radeon GPU users with the new enhancements and a much-welcomed performance increase.
According to the release notes of AMD's latest Catalyst Software Suite 10.2, the new release includes the ATI Radeon display driver 8.702, HydraVision for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 operating systems, the WDM Driver Install bundle, the southbridge/IXP driver and the Catalyst Control Center Version 8.702. The release adds support for the chip maker's Radeon HD 2000, 3000, 4000 and 5000 series of GPUs, providing users with the features that we detailed in a previous article.
In addition to the new features that should provide users of Radeon cards with a better visual experience out of their Radeon graphics cards, the new release includes a couple of adjustments that should enable some performance increases in some gaming applications. According to the release notes of the Catalyst 10.2 suite, the following performance increase should be noticed:
DiRT 2 – Overall performance improves up to 8% on ATI Radeon HD 5970, ATI Radeon HD 5800 series, and ATI Radeon HD 5700 series products Battleforge – CrossFire ATI Radeon HD 5870 performance improves up to 6% Unigine Heaven – DirectX 9 CrossFire performance has improved significantly on ATI Radeon HD 5700 and ATI Radeon HD 5800 series products The Chronicles of Riddick – Assault on Dark Athena – Overall performance on ATI Radeon HD 5970 improves up to 4%
The new release is available for download right here on Softpedia, following the links below:
Download ATI Catalyst 10.2 Software Suite for Windows XP 32-bit Download ATI Catalyst 10.2 Software Suite for Windows XP 64-bit Download ATI Catalyst 10.2 Software Suite for Windows Vista/Windows 7 32-bit Download ATI Catalyst 10.2 Software Suite for Windows Vista/Windows 7 64-bit