14 DAY TRIAL // Only one hour gap between the two releases, but both ForceWare and Catalyst drivers promise to fix a series of reported bugs and also improve performance and increase compatibilities of ATI and Nvidia video cards.
On the Nvidia scenery, the latest drivers released are the Forceware 81.98 WHQL drivers, designed for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems. Most of all, this update addresses a series of bugs reported previously and also represents the first driver suite to ensure compatibility with the Windows Media Center 2005. The bugs that have been cleared with the release of today's ForceWare suite were spotted in Need For Speed: Most Wanted, in Flight Simulator 2004 if it was played with all high-quality settings on, while a few GeForce 7800 GTX 512 Mb video cards were reported to act very strange when coming out of stand-by mode. Nvidia has also announced a series of improvements for Civilisation 4 run on GeForce 7800 GT/GTX and 6800/6600, the update solves missing shades in Splinter Cell 1 if played on the 7800 GTX/GT and 6800 and it also solves freezing problems with GeForce 6800 Ultra and 5950 Ultra in Battlefield 2, when activating the sniper mode.
On the other side of the barricade, ATI didn't waste any time and released the new set of drivers only one hour after Nvidia. This is the 13th set of drivers issued this year by ATI, which was called Catalyst 5.13. What's new about this set of drivers is the compatibility with the Radeon X1600, material acceleration for the H.264 standard on the Radeon X1300/1600/1800 and also the support for the Radeon X1800 in CrossFire. The first driver suite that ATI will release next year will be published under the Catalyst 6.1 label.