*IF you are having technical issues with the ATI Catalyst driver, or your graphics card please report your issues here.

We have some amazing new features and functions added to this month’s ATI Catalyst driver release!

This is just the “first wave” of updates to our driver suite and just goes to show how dedicated AMD is to bringing added value – and a great experience for all users.

Here are the highlights of what is new in ATI Catalyst 10.2 this month:

New Features

ATI Catalyst™ application profiles for configurations supporting ATI CrossFireX™ technology

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ delivers support for the latest ATI CrossFireX™ profiles in a separate executable file; ensuring users have access to the absolute latest set of profiles installed on their PC.
  • The ATI Catalyst™ 10.2 package Includes the fully qualified ATI Catalyst™ 10.2 application profile list  (which includes all ATI CrossFireX profiles) and is installed by default
  • The latest application profile list is posted on amd.com in a separate .exe file that users can install to get the absolute latest application profiles (that have not yet been added to the official ATI Catalyst release)

ATI Catalyst™ support for ATI PowerPlay™ on configurations supporting ATI CrossFireX™ technology

• Significant power saving benefits for users with ATI Radeon™ HD 5900 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series, and ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 Series setup in ATI CrossFireX™ configurations
  • Automatically enabled in the ATI Catalyst™ driver for Windows® 7 and Windows Vista
  • Sets secondary GPU(s) engine and memory clocks to low levels and reduces voltage when the GPU(s) are not in use

ATI Catalyst™ support for DisplayPort audio

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ provides support for DisplayPort audio for DisplayPort panels

Support for ATI Eyefinity technology on configurations supporting ATI CrossFireX™ technology

• The ATI Catalyst™ 9.12 hotfix release provides ATI CrossFireX™ support on ATI Eyefinity configurations, allowing users to take advantage of their additional GPUs for increased gaming performance when driving high resolution ATI Eyefinity display groups
• Supported on the ATI Radeon™ HD 5970 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 Series, and ATI Radeon™ HD 5600 Series

Highlights of the ATI Catalyst™ 10.2 release for Linux includes:

New Features

Support for new Linux operating systems

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems: 
  • openSUSE 11.2 production support

For more information on ATI Catalyst 10.2 (for Windows® 7, Windows® Vista, Windows® XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the ATI Catalyst 10.2 release notes.

To download the driver, click here.

ATI Catalyst 10.2 is getting some great feedback from press!  I have included some links below with some of the positive press we have received so far:

HardOCP: here

TweakTown: here

Legit Reviews: here

PCPER.COM: here

Till Next Month,

Jay Marsden

Jay Marsden is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

It’s that time again for the ATI Catalyst™ driver update!  We have been getting great comments and feedback from the community because of this blog site.  Please continue to send us your feedback as we do review them all*.

*IF you are having technical issues with the ATI Catalyst driver, or your graphics card please report your issues here.

Here is what is new in ATI Catalyst 9.12:

ATI Catalyst™ support for DirectCompute 10.1

• This release of ATI Catalyst provides full support for DirectCompute 10.1 for the ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 4700 Series for both single card and configurations supporting ATI CrossFireX™ technology.

OpenGL 3.2 extension support

• This release of ATI Catalyst provides support for OpenGL 3.2 extension support on the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 Series GPUs.

• The following is a list of OpenGL™ 3.2 features and extensions added in ATI Catalyst 9.12:
  • Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.50.
  • BGRA vertex component ordering (GL_ARB_vertex_array_bgra).
  • Drawing commands allowing modification of the base vertex index (GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex).
  • Shader fragment coordinate convention control (GL_ARB_fragment_coord_conventions).
  • Provoking vertex control (GL_ARB_provoking_vertex).
  • Seamless cube map filtering (GL_ARB_seamless_cube_map).
  • Multisampled textures and texture samplers for specific sample locations (GL_ARB_texture_multisample).
  • Fragment depth clamping (GL_ARB_depth_clamp).
  • Geometry shaders (GL_ARB_geometry_shader4).
  • Fence sync objects (GL_ARB_sync).
  • transform_feedback2
  • texture_cubemap_array

Highlights of the ATI Catalyst 9.12 driver release for Linux include:

New Features

Support for new Linux operating systems

• This release of ATI Catalyst driver release for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:

• RedFlag DT6.0 SP3
• SLED and SLES 10SP3

ATI Catalyst Control Center™ –  Linux Edition:  Displays pages: user interface enhancements

• This release of ATI Catalyst driver release for Linux introduces support for a number of new display features found in the ATI Catalyst Control Center –  Linux Edition, highlights include:
  • CRT/VGA settings
  • TV settings
  • Component Video settings
  • Support for display projectors

• New Size and Position page
• New HDTV page

• New option for “Automatic setting for Size and Position adjustment”
• New image quality settings:  “flicker removal” and “S-Video/Composite sharpness”

• New Scaling Options page – new Overscan / Underscan controls
• New custom mode support for 576 modes

• Enables quick display configuration of display projectors

For more information on ATI Catalyst 9.12 (for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the ATI Catalyst 9.12 release notes.

To download the Catalyst 9.12 driver, click here.

In addition, the ATI Catalyst 9.12 hotfix driver will be made available today!

Highlights of the ATI Catalyst 9.12 hotfix release includes:

Support for the OpenCL™ GPU component of the ATI Stream SDK v2.0

• The ATI Catalyst 9.12 hotfix release provides full support for GPU acceleration of OpenCL when used in conjunction with the ATI Stream SDK v2.0.   This feature is supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5970 Series, ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series, ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series, ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series and the AMD FireStream™ 9200 Series of products.

For more information about ATI Stream technology and OpenCL, please visit. http://www.amd.com/stream

Support for ATI CrossFireX™ technology on configurations employing ATI Eyefinity technology configurations The ATI Catalyst 9.12 hotfix release provides support for ATI CrossFireX™ technology on configurations employing ATI Eyefinity technology, allowing users to take advantage of their additional GPUs for increased gaming performance when driving high resolution displays

• Supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5970 Series, ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series

Support for DisplayPort audio

• The ATI Catalyst 9.12 hotfix release adds support for DisplayPort audio for DisplayPort panels

Fixes the following issues:

• Resident Evil 5 – Performance drop during the opening cinematic
• Call of Duty Modern Warfare – Negative performance observed with a configuration supporting  ATI CrossFireX™ technology when using the thermal scope
• Wheelman – Game freezes while loading the game menu
• Flashing in various OpenGL titles – City of Heroes, Enemy Territories: Quake Wars, and Chronicles of Riddick
• Heaven benchmark (DirectX 9 mode) – Grass flicker and white boarders observed around the edges

Grab the hotfix driver : Here

Till Next Month, HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!

Jay Marsden

Jay Marsden is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

*IF you are having technical issues with the ATI Catalyst™ driver, or your graphics card please report your issues here.

Here is what is new in ATI Catalyst™ 9.11:

New Features

GPU Acceleration of H.264 video content using Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ supports the new Hardware Acceleration features of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta for video encoded in the H.264 format.

• Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth video playback, reduced system resource utilization, and to help preserve battery life.

• Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta is expected to be available for download from Adobe Labs (labs.adobe.com) before the end of the year. This feature is supported on the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800, ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 and ATI Radeon HD™ 4000 Series of products.

High Quality downscaling for Video Transcoding MSE

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ includes an enhancement for the ATI Video converter for users Transcoding high quality interlaced content (1920x1080i @60i videos) down to small resolution progressive content (320×240 @30p – iPod videos as an example), by maintaining high visual quality when down-scaling by a significant amount and converting interlaced video content to progressive.

Highlights of the Linux ATI Catalyst™ 9.11 release include:

New Features

Support for new Linux operating systems

• This release of ATI Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:

• RHEL 5.4 support
• openSUSE 11.2 early look support

To download the driver, click here.

Till Next Month,

Jay Marsden

Jay Marsden is a Public Relations Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

A little about me: I have been working in the GPU industry for approx 16 years, with most of that time at ATI Technologies doing many different jobs, from working in a lab testing for Hardware Qualification on ATI GPUS, to Product Marketing for ATI’s motherboard chipsets, to my current role as Public Relations Manager for AMD supporting reviews of our ATI GPUs and ATI Catalyst drivers.

The ATI Catalyst driver blogs have been gaining momentum, and interest is growing each and every month. The ATI Catalyst team is dedicated to keeping users informed about any and all updates on our drivers.

Between Windows 7, DirectX 11, and the new ATI Radeon GPUs, we are taking your visual experience to the next level with DirectX 11 support and new features like ATI Eyefinity technology. ATI Catalyst drivers are at the center of this innovation, driving new features and functions, while focusing on compatibility, and stability for all.

It is the ultimate tool for your GPU!

I have made you wait long enough – on to the ATI Catalyst 9.10 driver release!

New Features:

• Official ATI Catalyst WHQL release supporting ATI Radeon HD 5800 series GPUs. ATI Catalyst 9.10 now includes full GPU support for the award winning ATI HD Radeon 5800 series GPUs!
  

• Super Sample Anti-Aliasing for the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series. ATI Catalyst 9.10 provides support for a new Anti-Aliasing method on the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series.  Users can now experience the high level of anti-aliasing image quality using Super Sampling anti-aliasing while maintaining good performance levels.
  

Highlights of the ATI Catalyst 9.10 release for Linux includes:

• This release of ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems: Ubuntu 9.10 early look support

Highlights of resolved issues

• Ghostbusters video game no longer flickers between desktop and game play when anti-aliasing is set to 8X and game resolution set to 2560×1600
• Enabling Screen Space Ambient Occlusion option in “Riddick 2 Dark Athena” no longer causes the game to fail under Multi-GPU configurations
• Severe flickering no longer observed while running 3D games/samples on specific HDMI displays with configurations using ATI CrossFireX™ technology in tri and quad modes
• Desktop flashing no longer observed after driver installation and reboot with systems configured with Radeon ASIC in the primary PCIe slot and ATI Fire Stream™ ASIC in the secondary PCIe slot
• “Combat Mission Shock Force” no longer fails after a duration of game play
• Underscan/Overscan settings for TV can now be applied from the ATI Catalyst Control Center – TV Properties Adjustments page
• Changes to the “All Settings” and “Basic Quality” pages in ATI Catalyst Control Center - Avivo™ Video will now be retained after reboot

To download the driver, click here.

Discuss Catalyst 9.10 in our Forums.

See you Next Month!

Jay Marsden

Jay Marsden is a Public Relations Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst^TM9.9 Driver
With last month’s release of the ATI Catalyst^TM 9.8 driver, we saw huge game performance increases, given that, this month the driver team focused on other applications and optimizations.

ATI Catalyst^TM 9.9 Driver has no new features but does have the following resolved issues:

Anti-Aliasing support for Ghostbusters
ATI CrossFireX^TM support for Resident Evil 5
Graphics corruption fix for Sims 3
ATI Catalyst^TM Control Center – Basic mode now responds appropriately after exiting Quick Adjust Video Settings
Edge enhancement and de-noise sliders in ATI Catalyst Control Center no longer lags or appears out of sync with mouse movement
Launching Hotkeys Manager in ATI Catalyst Control Center no longer causes an unhandled exception error
The “Desktop Rotation” page in ATI Catalyst Control Center no longer shows additional information for the second display when the secondary adapter is connected
HDMI is now detected properly as DTV (HDMI) instead of DTV (DVI) when the HDMI display is hotplugged for the first time
ATI Catalyst Control Center no longer displays error message when specific HDMI displays are hot unplugged and hotplugged back
Intermittent failures no longer occur with Cyberlink MediaShow Espresso once a transcoding process has been completed

And last but surely not least, my favorite community: ATI Catalyst^TM 9.9 driver for Linux!

Support for new Linux operating systems
This release of ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:

• openSUSE 11.1 production support
• SLED and SLES 10 SP3 early look support

To download the full release notes, click here.

See you next month!

Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton

Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst^TM 9.8 Driver

Our test system configuration is:

AMD Phenom II 940 (3.0GHz) processor

Asus M3A79-T(790) motherboard

4GB DDR2-800 5-5-5-18 memory

Windows VISTA Ultimate SP1 64bit

This month we are seeing a massive performance increase with a whole host of games as compared to the ATI Catalyst 9.7 driver. Detailed release notes are available for most of the game optimizations; here are the highlights:

• Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance improves of up to 50% with the largest gains in configurations using ATI CrossFireX^TM technology.
• Company of Heroes DirectX 10 performance improves of up to 77%.
• Crysis DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 10% and quad mode performance improves of up to 34%.
• Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 7% and quad mode performance improves of up to 69%.
• Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 50% and quad mode performance improves of up to 88%.
• Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 40% and with quad mode performance improving of up to 60%.
• UnigineTropics OpenGL performance improvements of up to 20%.
• UnigineTropics DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in quad mode improvements of up to 20%.
• World in Conflict DirectX 10 performance improvements of up to by 10%.

Marketing sound bite: ATI Catalyst 9.8 – Open GL^TM 3.1 Support

It’s fitting that last weekend AMD was in attendance at Quakecon 2009 in Dallas,Texas where the world’s most prolific OpenGLsupporters gathered for 4 days of ‘peace, love and rockets,’ that we are announcing support for OpenGL 3.1 and the following details:

This release of the ATI Catalyst driver provides OpenGL 3.1 extension support.  The following is a list of OpenGL 3.1 features and extensions added in ATI Catalyst 9.8:

• Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 and 1.40.
• Instanced rendering with a per-instance counter accessible to vertex shaders (GL ARB draw instanced).
• Data copying between buffer objects (GL EXT copy buffer).
• Primitive restart (NV primitive restart). Because client enable/disable no longer exists in OpenGL 3.1, the PRIMITIVE RESTART state has become server state, unlike the Nvidia extension where it is client state. As a result, the numeric values assigned to PRIMITIVE RESTART and PRIMITIVE RESTART INDEX differ from the NV versions of those tokens.
• At least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders, in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders.
• Texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object).
• Rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle).
• Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object).
• SNORM texture component formats.

And last but surely not least, my favorite community: ATI Catalyst^TM 9.8 driver for Linux!

Support for new Linux operating systems

This release of ATI Catalyst driver for Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems: 

• RHEL 4.8 production support
• Ubuntu 9.04 production support

ATI Catalyst^TM Control Center – Linux Edition support for RandR 1.2

This release of the ATI Catalyst driver for  Linux introduces ATI Catalyst Control Center –  Linux Edition support for the RandR 1.2 extension API.  The following new features are now available in the ATI Catalyst Control Center – Linux Edition Display Manager:

• Display rotation
• Multiple display arrangement and desktop sizing

To download the full release notes here.

Please report all technical support issues here.

See you next month!

Cheers!

Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton

Ian McNaughton is senior manager of advanced marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.