To coincide with Windows 7's release to manufacturing, AMD has announced the latest version of its ATI Catalyst graphics driver.
Catalyst 9.7, available to download from game.amd.com, is a single unified WHQL-certified driver for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Key features of the release are listed by AMD as follows:
- Rock-solid stability and compatibility for AMD platforms running Windows 7
- Full support for the visually stunning desktop environment of Windows 7
- Game performance improvements in Windows 7 compared with Windows Vista in single card and multi-GPU configurations employing ATI CrossFireX technology
- Windows 7 support for accelerated video transcoding tasks utilising the system CPU and GPU via ATI Stream technology
- Full Windows 7 support for ATI FirePro professional graphics, delivering application performance leadership
With new drivers from AMD today, and a WHQL-certified release from NVIDIA yesterday, it all sounds like plain sailing in terms of Windows 7 driver support. Almost makes the early Windows Vista woes seem like a distant memory.
A list of all the changes found in Catalyst 9.7 - complete with performance improvements and resolved issues - can be found in AMD's official release notes (PDF).
