14 DAY TRIAL // Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices has recently announced the official introduction of its latest Catalyst Software Suite, version 9.5. The announcement was highly anticipated, given that the new set of Radeon graphics drivers were already leaked on the Internet late last week. However, with the official release, users can rest assured that what they are downloading comes directly from AMD's labs and is meant to further increase performance for their Radeon graphics cards. In addition, as with all new releases, the Catalyst Software Suite offers a number of resolved known issues, consequently allowing users to better take advantage of their cards.
According to the release notes of the new drivers, Radeon users will be able to upgrade to the latest Radeon display driver 8.612, as well as the new Catalyst Control Center version 8.612. The Catalyst suite also includes HydraVision support for both Windows XP and Vista operating systems, the WDM driver Install bundle and also the southbridge/IXP driver. However, as some of you already know, before you can upgrade to the latest release you will have to install Microsoft's .NET Framework version 2.0.
Catalyst 9.5 has been designed to provide users of Radeon 2000, 3000 and 4000 series GPUs with support for the latest Microsoft operating systems, including Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. In addition, the release meets Microsoft's WHQL certification for Windows 7.
In the release notes, AMD has also included a section where users can see the performance improvements delivered by the new drivers. Some of the measured examples are:
Unigine Tropics DX9 – performance gains of up to 11% for single GPU and ATI CrossFireXTM configurations with anti-aliasing enabled
Company of Heroes – performance gains of up to 10% for both single GPU and ATI CrossFireXTM configurations
BattleForge – performance gains of up to 10% for ATI CrossFireXTM configurations
The drivers are already available for download, here on Softpedia, following the links below:
ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 9.5 for Windows XP 32-bit
ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 9.5 for Windows XP 64-bit
ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 9.5 for Windows Vista 32-bit
ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 9.5 for Windows Vista 64-bit
ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 9.5 for Windows 7 32-bit
ATI Catalyst Software Suite Version 9.5 for Windows 7 64-bit