AMD, the second largest worldwide consumer chip maker, has just announced plans to release a free ATI Catalyst driver update that is said to instantly unlock new ATI Stream acceleration capabilities, which are already featured in millions of graphics cards based on the company's Radeon graphics processor. This will basically allow computer users to benefit from more computing power, as the central processing unit, as well as the graphics processing unit will be enabled to work together in order to accelerate additional applications, beyond just graphics. Basically, the ATI Stream has been designed to improve a system's overall performance by unlocking the GPU's computing performance capabilities.

  "ATI Stream is one of the best examples of the power of Fusion, and today's announcement is the first major step in taking this important new technology mainstream," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "For the millions of people that have already purchased an ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics card, this is one more way we're saying thank you and helping them get more out of their investment. For those who haven't yet, it's one more reason for them to go online right now and buy one."

According to AMD, an increasing number of independent software vendors, including ArcSoft and CyberLink, are currently developing, or have already developed, software applications for entertainment, gaming and the overall productivity, meant to take advantage of the new ATI Stream, which will be available for download free of charge.

In addition to the ATI Stream, AMD has also announced plans to release a free downloadable version of its ATI Avivo Video Converter utility, which is built as an easy-to-use application that enables transcoding of HD video of up to 17 times faster than with the CPU alone. Also, AMD has mentioned the release of its 8.12 version for the ATI Catalyst application, which is set to debut in December.

The new ATI Catalyst software suite is now available for download, here at Softpedia, for both the Windows XP 32-bit and the 64-bit version, as well as for the Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit.