Performance improvements within!
The latest iteration of ATI's Catalyst drivers, version 7.12, are now available from the official AMD Game website. The highlights of this new release are outlined below:
New Features:
Avivo™ Update
Catalyst™ 7.12 introduces an Avivo™ update. The update allows the ATI Catalyst ™ Control Centre to reflect what is supported by the driver taking into account the graphics card installed in the system, and will not expose any video features that is not supported by the driver. The DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) driver will perform a profiling mechanism to query the graphics capability and the Catalyst™ Control Centre queries the caps via the interface defined between the Catalyst™ Control Centre and the DXVA components. This feature will be supported on ATI Radeon™ 9500 series products and above.
Enhanced ATI Overdrive support for the ATI Radeon™ HD 2900 Series
This release of Catalyst™ introduces an enhanced version of ATI Overdrive for the ATI Radeon™ HD 2900 Series. Users can now Overclock both GPU engine and graphics memory clock speeds in CrossFire™ mode (and over-clock single ATI Radeon™ graphics accelerators as well). This version of ATI Overdrive also includes a new stress test application to verify any over-clocking speeds users may have configured (either manually or through the auto-tuning tool) on their ATI Radeon™ HD 2900 Series of graphics accelerators.
Performance Improvements:
The following performance improvements are noticed with Catalyst™ 7.12:
- 3DMark2005 performance improves 5% or more with largest gains noticed when Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering are disabled on systems containing either an ATI Radeon™ HD 2400 or ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 series of products
- Company of Heroes DX10 performance improves up to 5% on systems containing an ATI Radeon™ HD38x0 series of product
This of course is just the tip of the ice berg in terms of performance improvements. If you really want to know exactly what else has been improved and which bugs have been squashed, take a look at the official release notes which are viewable in PDF format by clicking here.
Source: game.amd.com
