Cat 8.2 succeeds version 8.1 to everyone's bewilderment
Friday 15th February 2008, 12:12:00 AM, written by Farid
Never letting the beat drop, the red --and somehow at the same time green-- team of mad MCs at AMD released yesterday the second version (the .2) of their 2008 series (the 8) of catalyst drivers for Radeon-family graphics cards.
Available for Windows XP, XP-64, Vista 32bit, Vista 64bit, Linux x86, x86-64 and more. According to AMD, one of the main highlight of this driver release is the performance increase, as much as 20%, in the DX10 mode of Company of Heroes for all Radeon HD 2x00 and HD 3x00 (Windows only, obviously).
Other highlights for the Windows version include bug fixes in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars’ level editor (Windows Vista), World of Warcraft when running in OpenGL mode (Vista) and Doom 3 when running in CrossFire with AA set to 16x and resolution to resolution to 2048x1536 and higher (Windows XP).
The release notes for Linux version only mentions a few Xserver compatibility fixes.
Available for Windows XP, XP-64, Vista 32bit, Vista 64bit, Linux x86, x86-64 and more. According to AMD, one of the main highlight of this driver release is the performance increase, as much as 20%, in the DX10 mode of Company of Heroes for all Radeon HD 2x00 and HD 3x00 (Windows only, obviously).
Other highlights for the Windows version include bug fixes in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars’ level editor (Windows Vista), World of Warcraft when running in OpenGL mode (Vista) and Doom 3 when running in CrossFire with AA set to 16x and resolution to resolution to 2048x1536 and higher (Windows XP).
The release notes for Linux version only mentions a few Xserver compatibility fixes.
Tagging
ati ± catalysts, 8, 2
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Crysis was an ~85% gain for me with crossfire enabled on both DX9 and DX10. DX10 is still painfully slow in places, but I think that's more the onus of the codepath versus the video hardware / drivers. I can play in the "Very high DX9" mode at full rez with VERY reasonable framerate. It's not 60+ by any stretch of the imagination, but it's quite playable for me.
But there's always room for more improvement. :)