Thoughts

It's clear AMD have made strides in some areas with the performance, features and ability of their Vista display driver for their D3D9 hardware. Direct3D performance is close enough (at least in our game sample) to take that out of any, "well I can't move to Vista yet, things are slow", consideration. The rejigging of Catalyst Control Center, Vista assisted now in the framework it targets, means it's quicker to load and consumes less resources. CIM does the business getting the driver and CCC on to and off of your system, working well out of the box.

All of those things are well and good, and if you add in expected full support for PVP-OPM and all that entails, you have a good starting point on the face of it. However things take a couple of steps back in other areas. Orca has shown up and, well, not delivered. Performance and compatibility is a marked step backwards from what you'll get on Windows XP in terms of OpenGL support.

Further, niggles like an April schedule for control of an antialiasing feature (it'll be controllable via the registry from now until then) and no support for Crossfire and OpenGL out of the box (although given the state of Orca we can understand that one) also irk.

However, it's a first-run driver for a brand new operating system, so some leeway is earned. Catalyst 7.4 looks like a decent target for things to have firmed up on Vista and we assume AMD will make good progress towards having something that matches the XP driver in expectation (in terms of performance and stability and features) by then.

Full Linux CCC support by the end of 2007 is a promising statement of intent for users of that OS, too, to squeeze that in to this Vista-heavy look at things. To close, we'll be pitting AMD and NVIDIA head-to-head under Vista, D3D9 and D3D10 in a big way in the coming weeks and months, and the driver is a big part of that. This first stepping stone is significant, and while not all good by any stretch, lets AMD plant a foot on the floor and hit the Vista ground running. If you use Radeon hardware under Vista, you'll definitely want this driver despite the pitfalls, versus the 6 month old build of Catalyst included with Vista.

Grab a copy here (x86) or here (x64).

And on the following page you can see an image gallery of sorts showing the new driver running under Vista, just in case you're curious. Click for bigger versions.

Comments

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