14 DAY TRIAL // Just two weeks after the original release of the Catalyst 7.5 series, AMD thought of renewing its driver series with a new one capable of delivering even more performance than the 7.5. The new Catalyst dubbed 7.6 (of course...) introduces, among other features and improvements, full support for video capture with the help of an Ati All-in-Wonder graphics card.
And that's good news for all of you owners of an All-in-Wonder series because the new capture module is compatible with Snapstream's Beyond TV 4.6. Unfortunately the same cannot be said about Vista Media center since in this case AMD leaves users with an empty hand. Now I don't know whether it's a compatibility issue or Vista Media Center simply does not have support for All-in-Wonder series but the result is pretty much the same: the capture module cannot function under this specific OS.
The latest ATI Catalyst 7.6 driver suite also introduces full support for AMD's latest graphics cards such as the mainstream and value HD 2000 series, including the HD 2900, HD 2600 and HD 2400-series. Unfortunately for you HD 2900 users, AMD makes no references regarding the hardware acceleration of HD content on the HD 2900 series. And what's even weirder is the fact that they don't even mention the UVD support for the HD 2600 / 2400 series which are UVD capable.
Regarding the performance improvements, AMD has rolled out patches inside the driver suite for the following games: Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Dark Messiah Might and Magic. However, the performance improvement is only meant to work with Crossfire setups between two HD 2900 cards. In this particular case AMD states that the performance improvement is about 16% when HDR is enabled.
ATI Radeon users can download the new ATI Catalyst 7.6 suite directly from Softpedia. The links for Windows Vista 32/64-bit are here and here. As for Windows XP users, you should try here.
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