14 DAY TRIAL // In the recent months, AMD has surprised everybody by releasing a series of new Catalyst drivers, designed to provide users of ATI Radeon graphics cards with a bunch of new features. Both the Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3 releases have been received with enthusiasm by users, thanks to the performance increments and the new features that have been made available for Radeon cards. On that note, the Sunnyvale, California-based chip maker has followed its policy and released a new Catalyst suite, version 10.4.
The new release is now available for download and will provide users of Radeon cards with improved performance and functionality, while also increasing frame rates in some games. According to the release notes of the new drivers, the latest Catalyst Suite will deliver H.264 level 5.1 support and it includes a number of video transcoding updates. The company's blog page includes a reference to the new releases, which highlights the following changes:
ATI Catalyst – Video enhancements
- H.264 Level 5.1 support - ATI Catalyst can now playback 5.1 level streams on all support players - Allows for playback of high resolutions (4Kx2K)
AMD video transcoding updates
- This release of ATI Catalyst provides enhanced support for the Windows 7 Drag and Drop video converter - Performance improvements - New formats supported (H.264 file formats – MTS, WTV, and WMV9 Complex profile interlaced content) - ATI Catalyst Control Center™ option for enabling/disabling GPU acceleration - Support for the ATI Video converter is now available in the advanced view of the ATI Catalyst Control Center
In addition, it looks that gaming enthusiasts will also benefit from the features in the new release, as there are a number of performance improvements which have been noted in the releases notes. Depending on the system configuration, users of the Radeon HD 5970 graphics cards should see an increase of up to 6%, while the 5800 series and 5700 series should deliver a 3% performance increase, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky.
The new release is available for download, right here on Softpedia, following the links below:
ATI Catalyst Display Driver 10.4 for Windows XP 32-bit ATI Catalyst Display Driver 10.4 for Windows XP 64-bit ATI Catalyst Display Driver 10.4 for Windows Vista/Windows 7 32-bit ATI Catalyst Display Driver 10.4 for Windows Vista/Windows 7 64-bit