AMD release Catalyst 7.9 display driver

Monday 10th September 2007, 08:08:00 PM, written by Rys

It's Monday, it's the 10th of the month, and there's a north-westerly blowing past my office window. "What could that mean?!", I hear you all cry. Why, Catalyst 7.9 of course.

Sorry, no, that'd be NVIDIA's driver release schedule. Whoops.

The 9th GPU display driver of 2007 from AMD brings users the following:

Highlights of the Catalyst 7.9 release include:

Performance Improvements

• Far Cry performance improves as much as 14 % on the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT in Crossfire mode, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT single card, and ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT in Crossfire mode.
  
• Call of Duty 2 performance with Anti-Aliasing enabled improves as much as 12% on the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT in single card and Crossfire configurations
  
• Half-Life 2: Episode 1 performance improves as much as 9% on the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT in Crossfire mode and as much as 6% on the ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT in Crossfire mode
  
• Serious Sam 2 performance improves as much as 46% on the ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT in Crossfire mode and up to 27% with Anti-Aliasing enabled on the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT in single card and Crossfire configurations
  
• Quake 4 performance with Anti-Aliasing enabled improves 9% or more on the ATI Radeon X1600, ATI Radeon X1650 Pro, ATI Radeon X1300, and ATI Radeon X1550 series of products in both single and Crossfire configurations
  

New features

• This release of Catalystâ„¢ introduces the Avivo Video Converter for the Windows Vista (64 bit) operating system. The Avivo Video Converter is a transcoder tool that provides a quick and easy way of converting videos from one format to another. The Avivo Video Converter found within the Catalystâ„¢ Control Center, allows the user to select the input file, and output format, along with the quality level and file location. The Avivo. Video Converter accepts a wide variety of file formats as a source, and outputs to file formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX, WMA, H.264/AVC and more.

Catalyst Control Center: Color Temperature Control

• This release of Catalystâ„¢ introduces Color Temperature Control within the Catalyst Control Center, allowing users to adjust the chromatic level shown on their display. Supported on the ATI Radeon X1000 Series and Radeon HD 2000 Series of products.

The 7.9 Linux driver's coming soon, according to AMD, and it's the one that'll bring support for HD 2000-series graphics hardware, significant OpenGL performance increases for a variety of Radeons, and support for running digital panels on the 2nd output port.

Catalyst 7.9 packages are available for Windows Vista 32-bit, Windows Vista 64-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit, Windows Media Center Edition, Linux 32-bit and Linux 64-bit. (Linux soon as mentioned, links are there anyway and you can still get 7.8)

amd ± catalyst, linux, nvidia, release, schedule, sucks

RWT Analyzes Bulldozer Benchmarks
AMD Bulldozer microarchitecture analysis
Say hello to GLOBALFOUNDRIES
AMD completes deal with ATIC to create The Foundry Company
AMD Propus to be released in Q2 & Q3
AMD launch 45nm Phenom II processor
AMD goes Asset Smart; splits into two
Beyond Programmable Shading course notes available
AMD launches FireStream 9250 with 200Gflops DP via RV770
AMD GPGPU solutions get extra support from industry partners