14 DAY TRIAL // Following the release of its latest Radeon graphics card, the mainstream-oriented HD 5670 model, the Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices announced today the release of a new set of Catalyst graphics drivers. Already leaked on the Internet late last week, release 10.1 is expected to add support for new games, to provide users with a couple of bug fixes, as well as new features. The new drives are available for users of AMD's latest generations of Radeon graphics cards and can be downloaded here at Softpedia.
According to the release notes of the new Catalyst suite, users of Radeon 5700 and 5800 series of graphics cards should experience an overall performance increase of about 3%, when playing Left 4 Dead. In addition, in Crysis, the Radeon 5700 series should deliver a performance increase of 3%, which goes to up 4% with the Radeon HD 5800 series. Unfortunately, unlike the leaked drivers, the new release doesn't mention anything about the support for 3D Stereo support.
For those looking to upgrade their system to the new drivers, we should mention that there already are a couple of feedbacks on what the new release brings. According to a couple of users that have commented on the outfit's blog pages, the new release is identified as being released in December 2009, which we can confirm. In addition, there are a series of other reports that basically talk about the drawbacks of the new release. User “Aaron” claims that “This driver does not compile on Ubuntu 9.10”, but that is yet to be confirmed.
Despite the issues that some users are reporting, Jay Marsden, a product marketing manager at AMD, states, in a blog post related to the new release, that, “Over the next few months AMD is planning to roll out some major new features and functionality into the ATI Catalyst drivers. I can’t give you all the specifics now, but will keep you posted on any new features and functions as they become available.” Our only guess is that, future release will enable some of the features that ATI Radeon users have been expecting for quite some time.
Meanwhile, for those of you that want to experiment with the new release, we can provide you with the download links for Windows XP, Vista and 7 operating systems. Be sure to click on a link that's compatible with your configuration.
ATI Radeon Catalyst 10.1 Driver Suite for Windows XP 32-bit ATI Radeon Catalyst 10.1 Driver Suite for Windows XP 64-bit ATI Radeon Catalyst 10.1 Driver Suite for Windows Vista/Windows 7 32-bit ATI Radeon Catalyst 10.1 Driver Suite for Windows Vista/Windows 7 64-bit
