AMD's collaboration with Microsoft pays off

Jul 23, 2009 06:58 GMT  ·  By

Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices has just announced the release of its latest WHQL-certified drivers for graphics cards, delivering support for the recently launched Windows 7 RTM milestone. With the release, users of ATI Radeon graphics cards will be able to boost their system's performance by downloading the latest ATI Catalyst 9.7 suite, which also includes the newest graphics drivers for AMD's Radeon graphics cards. In addition, the chip maker has also announced the introduction of the new ATI Catalyst 8.632 driver, designed to deliver support for ATI FirePro professional graphics products.

“As we approach the final release of Windows 7, possibly Microsoft’s most visually impressive operating system to date, we continue to improve upon the industry leading stability and reliability of ATI Catalyst drivers in order to consistently deliver an incredibly immersive, high performance graphics experience to our customers,” said Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president of software, AMD Products Group. “Today’s release of ATI Catalyst 9.7 and ATI Catalyst 8.632 drivers does exactly that, delivering incredibly stable and reliable graphics drivers.”

According to a recent press release from the world's second largest chip maker, the new drivers should offer increased stability and compatibility for AMD platforms running on Windows 7, several game performance enhancements in Windows 7 compared to Windows Vista, in both single-GPU and multi-GPU configurations, full-support for Windows 7 on ATI FirePro professional graphics, and Windows 7 support for accelerated video transcoding using the company's ATI Stream technology, which utilizes the system’s CPU and GPU.

In a recent blog post on the company's website, AMD says it has seen 8 percent improvement in Crysis with 'very high' quality presets, using the new drivers and ATI Radeon 4800-series products, while in “Lost Planet Colonies” performance increases were up to 7-11% with 8x Anti-Aliasing and ATI Radeon 4800-series cards.

The download links for the new drivers are yet to be made available, but the company promised they would be online very soon, enabling AMD users to take advantage of the full Windows 7 experience. We will update the article as soon as the drivers will be available, so please stay tuned.

Update: The download links have just been made available and we can now provide you with the Catalyst 9.7 WHQL-Certified drivers for Microsoft's Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 RTM operating systems.

ATI Catalyst 9.7 WHQL-Certified Drivers for WIndows XP 32-bit ATI Catalyst 9.7 WHQL-Certified Drivers for WIndows XP 64-bit ATI Catalyst 9.7 WHQL-Certified Drivers for WIndows 7/VISTA 32-bit ATI Catalyst 9.7 WHQL-Certified Drivers for WIndows 7/VISTA 64-bit