*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 (1920×1080i @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.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. 
Have you wondered what all the hype around Microsoft Windows 7 and DirectX 11 is all about? We will shed some light and answer some of those questions in this blog.

Let’s start with Windows7, everyone, including my own mother, is talking about this amazing operating system. Microsoft is rumoured to be launching the successor to Windows Vista in late October. What does it mean to you the PC user?

I cover my experience with Windows 7 in this blog; in a nutshell, the experience has been fantastic. It seems that Microsoft has worked out all the kinks and quirkiness of Windows Vista and are about to launch an incredible OS for the PC. Windows 7 (when compared to Windows Vista) is designed to offer the user a much more refined experience, smaller footprint, faster response times, long battery life and a much more visually intense and enjoyable PC experience.

Wrapped up in all the new Windows 7 OS splendour is a new API (Application programming Interface) called DirectX 11. Basically, the API allows developers to program software that uses a standard set of terms to communicate with the libraries and the OS. Think of it as game developers have some new toys to play with inside Windows to allow them to deliver better software.

DirectX has been around since 1995 with the launch of Windows95, a full history can be found here.

Let me break down the features and benefits of DirectX 11 -- the main features being:
-Tessellation  -- Multithreaded Rendering  - DirectCompute

Tessellation is a technology that has been around for a few GPU (graphics processing unit) generations. AMD has had Tessellation support since 2001, which was then called Truform; we also implemented Tessellation in the XBOX 360 GPU, then codenamed “Xenos”. Tessellation is a feature which increases the number of polygons in an image. Basically, Tessellation enables a more lifelike image, both of objects and landscape. Back in the day characters who were CG (computer generated) looked very blocky, almost cartoon like; with the use of Tessellation, developers are now able to significantly increase the number of triangles to draw an image, thus creating a more lifelike quality in games.

Multithreaded Rendering is a feature which allows DirectX to be processed via multiple CPU threads. This means that a dual-, triple- or quad-core CPU can have a higher utilization across all cores than DirectX APIs in the past. Historically the OS would load up a single core for commands to the GPU, in essence creating an overload on the first core and under utilizing the additional cores. With only one core issuing commands to a GPU, we have seen CPUs hold back the potential performance of the GPU. With Multithreaded Rendering, DirectX will take better advantage of all the available cores. This should result in a better experience for the multi-core user because of a faster processing pipeline and increased scaling.

DirectCompute is a feature which allows access to the shader cores/pipeline for Stream Computing (graphics acceleration) type applications and physics acceleration. One of the biggest technology breakthroughs of the past 5 years has been the notion that processing can be moved from the traditional CPU to the much more parallel GPU. Simply put, the CPU manages tasks sequentially; it accomplishes a task then moves on to the next task in a very orderly fashion and with tremendous speed. Today’s CPUs can work at speeds of up to 108.8 GigaFLOPS (Floatingpoint Operations Per Second).

A GPU is designed to work with many slower cores in parallel, giving a much wider vector -meaning a wider road for more cars to travel on -- than a CPU. This allows tasks to be completed faster if the program or software is developed to take advantage of many-many cores, albeit slower ones. Today’s GPUs can work at speeds up to 1.36 TeraFLOPS, giving the GPU a significant (almost 11 times faster) advantage when the proper software is run. This advantage truly delivers on the processing capabilities of Stream Computing. DirectCompute allows easier access to the GPU’s many cores for parallel processing; if the user is running applications that take advantage of Stream Computing then the performance experience increases considerably. We are seeing transcoding as the first type of task that is seeing tremendous benefit using Stream Computing. This means if you are an avid HD video or music user you will benefit when converting files to play on your laptop or iPod type devise; Stream Computing can significantly cut down the wait-time for enjoying your converted media.

Now, if you are a gamer you undoubtedly will be asking me “What games are going to support DirectX 11″? This is always a tightrope to walk for us as we are unable to pre-announce our technology partners titles and the specs around those titles; still, we want to give the consumer confidence that we’ve been assured there will be substantial titles in the market that take full advantage of your ATI Radeon DirectX 11-compliant graphics card. So, as this blog is published, here are the future DirectX 11 games we can talk about:

Dirt2 by Codemasters
BattleForge by EA
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat by GSC Game World

- Check out this early spoiler for Dirt 2 -

Some industry folks have stated that we will see more titles that support DirectX 11 then we did for DirectX 10. Some even say that DirectX 11 is the full implementation of what DX10 should and could have been, but that is subjective opinion and conjecture.

Game developers discuss the benefits of DirectX11

Windows7 and DirectX11 are right around the corner, as is the newest ATI Radeon family of graphics cards. As always, it’s our goal to blur the lines between reality and what is rendered. I believe we have made a major leap towards crossing that chasm with our ATI RadeonTM HD 5000 series products and their support for DirectX 11.

Tessellation - Minimized

With Tessellation - Maximized!

Between now and the launch of Windows 7 and DirectX 11, we will continue to uncover the technical details, as well as the visual implications, for the user experience.

At the time of this blog, AMD will be the first GPU vendor to market with a fully compliant and enabled DirectX 11 graphics product. So don’t be fooled by claims in the market about DX10 GPU’s supporting DirectX 11….

My good friend Tim Smalley from bit-tech.net has a great in-depth article on DirectX 11: A look at what’s coming – Check it out.

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.

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.

“Last night, Darth Vader came down from planet Vulcan and told me that if I didn’t take Lorraine out that he’d melt my brain”. – George McFly

PMS Clan and a future gaming superstar on our Quakecon booth

Well, its day 2 at Quakecon 2009 and my brain hasn’t melted, but I have seen a Darth Vader or two… In thinking about the ‘right’ title for my blog, “The Future” was an obvious choice seeing as how we have packed up #Area64 and transported it all the way to Dallas.

What is #Area64 you ask, well, it’s the secret place in Austin where AMD has all of its unreleased products, engineering secrets and where we keep the flux capacitor. As one can imagine, we need to keep such a place heavily guarded and hard to find, so, what do a bunch of AMD gamers do, we packed it up and rebuilt it in the Gaylord Hotel for Quakecon. I am currently writing this blog from the heart of our mobile #area64, the sounds of next generation technology humming away behind me!

Pete and Chris from AMD showcasing our Quakecon shirts...

Wait a minute, Doc. Ah… Are you telling me that you built a time machine… out of a DeLorean? – Marty McFly

No, we didn’t bring our time machine but I am not going to comment on if AMD has built a time machine, that’s a completely different blog. But, we did bring what we expect will revolutionize the way you play games on PC’s in the future.

How does one gain access into #area64 and who gets access, great questions, here is what you have to do:

AMD will be limiting access to #Area64 to 100 almost random gamers, meaning anyone and everyone has a fair shot at “Seeing the Future”, just follow these AMD’ers on Twitter;

@IanMcNaughton – @Tweetoe – @Catalystmaker - @AMD_Unprocessed & @Caseygotcher

We will be tweeting hints and actions during Quakecon, it could be as simple as “The first 5 gamers who meet us at XX, gain access” or “Make a short video about Why you need or should have access to #Area64 and post to Youtube, gain access”.

Or, you could simply track us down and ask for an “on the spot action for access”.

Here are the shirts we are giving away, they are unique and numbered from 1-100, if you see anyone wearing them in the halls or BYOC, you know they have “SEEN THE FUTURE”!

The Future is Awesome!

As a special treat to all the readers of my blog, via this blog, you will be the first to download the latest ATI Catalyst 9.8 driver here:

XP

XP 32

Xp 64

Vista and Win7

Vista/Win7 32

Vista/Win7 64

[Update: Official ATI Catalyst 9.8 Drivers are available here]

Enjoy!

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.

Back in the early nineties, there was a game that truly defined all video games that followed, do you remember? Well, for those readers who were not born yet, the game was called Wolfenstein 3D and its introduction was a defining moment.  Some believe that Wolfenstein 3D defined the FPS as we know it. I would have to completely agree! 

If you were a Doom player then you can thank Wolf 3D for blazing the trail for what was, is, and continues to be an amazing gaming franchise.  Fast forward to August 2009 and transport yourself to Dallas, Texas and you can relive those original Wolf 3D experiences with AMD at Quakecon 2009.

id Software has teamed up with Raven Studios to develop a new game called “Wolfenstein”.  In the new game you play the original character William B.J Blazkowicz who just happens to be a super metalled out member of the Office of Secret Actions (OSA).  Come on, how cool would that business card be?

Ian McNaughton
AMD
Office of Secret Actions

Will need to print some of those up for Quakecon!

The new Wolfenstein looks fantastic, I was able to score an early copy to hone my skillz in preparation for this weekend’s festivities and the game is awesome so far…

AMD will be showcasing Wolfenstein on our booth as well as in #area64. 

We will also be providing live updates via Twitter and vlogs via blogs.amd.com.

#Area64 will be exclusive access only, meaning, you can try to find it, but its hidden and being kept secret.  AMD will be showcasing what we lovingly refer to as “The Future”, if you want to see the future, follow me as well as @AMD_Unprocessed ,  @Catalystmaker, @caseygotcher and @Tweetoe for ways to get invited.

Strap in and hold on, Quakecon 2009 is about to begin!

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.

With four months of ATI Catalyst^TM driver blogs under our belt, we are seeing a steady engagement from the community via this blog site.  Please keep up the comments and suggestions and we will endeavor to answer as many as we can.  So, without further ado – let me introduce the ATI Catalyst 9.7 Driver Release!           

 Please report all driver related issues here. 

*If you are having technical issues with your graphics card or are in need of driver support, please use the proper channels to submit those issues here.*

Marketing sound bite: ATI Catalyst 9.7 – AMD’s first official unified Windows 7 / Windows Vista Microsoft WHQL certified graphics driver for the Windows 7 RTM

ATI Catalyst 9.7 driver is AMD’s first official unified WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) certified graphics driver designed for Windows 7 RTM (Release to Manufacturing) as well as Windows Vista.  Being able to have a single unified driver can enable power users to continue to support their existing OS while also experiencing the great new features of Windows 7 while running dual OS’s.

In a previous blog I highlight my own personal experience but for the purposes of this blog here are the Windows 7 highlights:

• Superior gaming performance when compared to previous Microsoft OS’s using either a single GPU configuration or ATI  CrossfireX^TM technology configurations
• Superior stability via AMD’s WHQL certified and unified Windows 7/Windows Vista graphics driver
• Leadership in Innovation with support for all the Windows 7 WDDM 1.1 features and ATI Catalyst^TM features with current ATI Radeon^TM HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 series of products.

Marketing sound bite: ATI Catalyst^TM 9.7 – ATI Catalyst^TM Control Center – Enhanced user interface

When our customers provide feedback, we listen! Case in point, we have received feedback that the Catalyst GUI needed a refresh, some parts of the GUI were not efficient and required a makeover, AMD listened and delivered. 

In this new beta version of Catalyst^TM Control Center we have a newly redesigned user interface to enhance usability and end user efficiency, which includes a newly designed Desktops and Displays Manager which will enable users to quickly configure and arrange their displays.  Most of us power users have multiple monitors and as such, this will help with the frustrations of multi monitor management, especially with scenarios where a laptop is removed from a docking station prior to sleeping and returned prior to sleeping.  ATI Catalyst^TM 9.7 has full support for Hydravision under Windows 7.

We have designed in a new streamlined look where the settings and controls are now found in the new “Graphics” and “Options” drop down menus allowing users to very quickly select different tabs and adjust the desired settings.

All of the above enhancements to ATI Catalyst^TM Control Center are supported under Windows 7 and Windows Vista. This beta version is the first in an exciting transition for CCC and we await feedback!

Marketing sound bite: ATI Catalyst^TM 9.7 – ATI Video Converter update – support for Windows 7

With the introduction of Catalyst^TM 9.7, we are introducing support for the ATI Video converter under Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit versions. 

With the massive explosion of mainstream consumption of HD video, owners of ATI Radeon^TM HD 4800 and ATI Radeon^TM HD 4600 series of graphics cards can now take advantage of the video conversion tool found in the ATI Catalyst^TM Control Center under Basic View.  Using this video conversion tool, users can benefit from substantial performance improvements when transcoding video files.

Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst^TM 9.7

Our test system configuration is:

This month we are seeing a further performance increase with Crysis and Lost Planet Colonies as compared to ATI Catalyst 9.6.  Following are some of this month’s highlights. Detailed release notes are available for most of the game optimizations; I have simply picked a few to highlight in this blog.

• Crysis – performance gains at ‘very high’ quality presets increase by up to 8% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 series products. 
• Lost Planet Colonies – performance increase of up to 7-11% when 8x Anti-Aliasing  is used on the ATI Radeon HD 4800  series products

And last but surely not least, my favorite community: Linux® ATI Catalyst^TM 9.7

This month’s release has support for the following new operating systems:

• RedFlag DT 7.0 production support

To download the full release notes, click 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.

Did you skip Windows Vista waiting for Windows 7 with bated breath? 

Let’s call out the “white elephant” in the room: Gamers have resisted Windows Vista in favour of Windows XP.  I have to admit, I was one of those gamers, just didn’t see the benefit vs. cost to upgrade my OS, especially given my usage model which was mainly gaming at the time. 

Fast forward a year or two and it’s a totally different story, I still game, but I also am doing a lot more video consumption and creation (albeit creating n00b videos of my kids).  It also helps that I have had early access to Windows 7 prior to the RC being publically available.  This has completely changed my view and opinion on when (not if) a user should embrace and get excited about the upcoming release of Microsoft’s newest OS, Windows 7.

So, I expect the flames in the comments, and I am happy to have the debate. Maybe I am a lone voice in the world, perhaps I am drinking the kool-aid.  I had a discussion the other day with a friend of mine, a hardcore gamer and content consuming machine, a true AMD enthusiast.  This guy lives, eats and breathes AMD, and during this discussion he basically called me out as being a n00b for running Windows 7 on my main home PC and work laptop, he actually laughed.  This made me start to question the experience I thought I was having, which by the way has been awesome, flawless and very favourable in terms of recommending to others to adopt.  I questioned myself until I came across a Facebook post from another friend who is a true enthusiast – former AMD’er, now with the world’s largest PC OEM – a working dad, video editing guy and casual gamer, he summed up his experience with Windows 7 nicely, I thought I would share it with you:

So the debate will rage on, sides will be taken, lines will be drawn, artillery will be engaged and the battle will ensue.  It’s funny how something as simple as an OS evokes such emotion in the PC enthusiast.  MAC users will gush over the superiority of the “chosen ones” MAC OS X Snow Leopard, PC users will throw daggers at Redmond in hopes they will listen, the penguin community will continue to garner more and more OEM wins and mainstream adoption, but at the end of the day we have one major OS option and this time around, it’s a really good option!

Would like to hear from the community, how has your Windows 7 experience been so far? Please post in comments.

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.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

With three months of ATI Catalyst™ driver blogs under our belt, we are seeing a steady engagement from the community via this blog site.  Please keep up the comments and suggestions and we will endeavor to answer as many as we can.  So, without further ado – let me introduce ATI Catalyst 9.6!       

Please report all driver related issues here. 

*If you are having technical issues with your graphics card or are in need of driver support, please use the proper channels to submit those issues here.*

Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst™ 9.6

Our test system configuration is:

This month we are seeing a further performance increase with Company of Heroes and some significant performance increases for Crysis Warhead, Crysis and World in Conflict, compared with last month’s ATI Cataylst 9.5 driver.  Following are some of this month’s highlights. Detailed release notes are available here.

• Company of Heroes – performance gains of up to 25% for the ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series, and performance gains of up to 10% for the ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
• Crysis Warhead – performance gains of up to 11% for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual configuration. 
• Crysis – performance gains of up to 13% for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual configuration. 
• World in Conflict – performance gains of up to 30% for high settings that were previously CPU limited with the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series.

Of course, your performance may vary, depending on your particular system configuration.

And last but surely not least, my favorite community: Linux® ATI Catalyst™ 9.6 Driver

This month’s release has support for the following new operating systems:

·         SLED and SLED 11 production support

·         RHEL 4.8 early look support

ATI MultiView™ for Consumer users

·         Allows users to render applications using a multiple GPU configuration with a unified workspace

·         Enables Xinerama in single or multiple GPU configurations

·         Supported on any combination of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4000,  ATI Radeon™ 3000 Series and ATI Radeon™ 2000 Series of graphics cards

To download the full release notes, click 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.

Microsoft, and those of us in the graphics business, have been openly talking about DirectX 11 for around a year now – in fact, to be honest we’ve been talking about it since even before Windows Vista shipped at the very end of 2006!  It takes a long time to put together a new version of DirectX and there are often tough decisions about what to leave out while finalizing any one version.  So we often agree that the parts which are being left out in the ‘current’ version will find their way into the next version. 

So let’s take a good look at what’s in DirectX 11.  I’m not going to go into painful technical detail; instead, I will try to look at the consequences of those technical details.  One important note, unlike DirectX 10, DirectX 11 isn’t tied to Windows 7, so those of you sporting a Windows Vista system will get to reap the rewards as well.

There are three main areas of impact in DirectX 11:

1.  A beast called the tessellator has been added which enables games developers to create smoother, less blocky and more organic looking objects in games. This is the change you’ll probably be most aware of. And it’ll show up when you look at the silhouettes of hills and mountains or the profiles of characters in games. Where artists previously had to trade off quality for performance, now artists will have the freedom to create naturalistic scenery. We’ve gotten used to seeing strangely blocky ears and noses on our opponents. But the new generation of games should allow those opponents to scare the heck out of us instead. The tessellator represents a natural next step in gaming hardware (in fact the Xbox 360 graphics chip that AMD designed already has a tessellator, and AMD graphics hardware has featured tessellator technology starting with the ATI Radeon^TM HD 2000 series right up to the latest ATI Radeon^TM HD 4000 series cards today).

[An example of tessellation giving characters more definition.]

2.  Games programmers will also be given a radically new way to program for AMD graphics chips. The second new beast in the menagerie is the excitingly named “Compute Shader”. It allows games programmers to treat the GPU in a much less graphics-oriented way; indeed, they can almost treat it like a highly parallel CPU. [The buzzword for this is "GPGPU" , see http://blogs.amd.com/play/2008/11/05/the-gpgpu-chronicles/ for details.]

Up until DirectX 10.1 a graphics programmer always had to think in terms of triangles – but the compute shader changes that and allows the programmer a much freer expression of their thoughts.  If you try to solve a problem of artificial intelligence or physics, you probably don’t think the problem through in terms of triangles.  So the compute shader is a more natural way for the programmer to approach his or her task.  On top of that it allows access to some of the features that would otherwise have been hidden away inside our present and future chips and for that reason it will often allow significantly more efficient implementations than heretofore (that means “higher frame rates” to you and me ).

3.  DirectX has been sliced and diced and the internals redesigned to ensure that it is much more efficient at using the horsepower present in multiple CPU cores. This will be a huge win on chips like our AMD Phenom^TM II quad and triple core processors [http://www.amd.com/gb-uk/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_15331_15332,00.html] and it will provide the opportunity for both higher frame rates and games which are more realistic, because they contain dramatically more detail.

There are numerous other, less important changes aimed to make the games programmer’s tasks easier.  Some so small that you’d have to be a games programmer to care, some (like improved texture compression) are big enough to help out significantly with performance in corner cases.

Quite often you get to hear rather bland but optimistic statements about the future versions of DirectX.  “It’ll be faster and better” – but you don’t get to hear much in the way of substantial justification.

This time around I hope it’s abundantly clear – I predict that:

• We’ll see higher frame rates because the way DirectX 11 uses CPUs will be more efficient.
• We’ll see higher frame rates because games developers will be able to use our GPUs more like CPUs.
• We’ll see smoother, more realistic characters and more realistic terrain as we move away from blocky polygonal representations to the kind that are used in movies.
• And a side-benefit, that will help PC gaming generally, is that the new version is easier to use, so it will help to keep game development costs down.

On top of that there’s something worth mentioning here about the evolution of computer graphics.  Every generation of DirectX has been designed to be an improvement upon the previous generation.  We always make a point of including all the old functionality (so that you can run any of your existing games).  This time is no exception; the nearest thing to DirectX11 is DirectX10.1.  And it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I can’t resist mentioning that this means that owners of ATI Radeon^TM HD 4000 series graphics have a distinct advantage, since AMD is the only major supplier of graphics chips that supports DirectX 10.1 http://ati.amd.com/products/Radeonhd4800/index.html .  DirectX 10.1 is the closest you can get to DirectX 11 until Windows 7 ships.

When it does ship though, get ready for a significantly improved gaming experience thanks to the combination of DirectX 11 features enabled by phenomenal new DirectX 11 hardware from AMD.

Richard Huddy is Sr. Manager Developer Relations 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.

With 2 months of ATI Catalyst^TM driver blogs under our belt, we are seeing a steady engagement from you guys in the community via this blog site.  Please keep up the comments and suggestions and we will endeavor to answer as many as we can.  So, without further ado – let me introduce ATI Catalyst 9.5!

Please report all driver related issues here. 

*If you are having technical issues with your graphics card or are in need of driver support, please use the proper channels to submit those issues here.*

Marketing sound bite: ATI Catalyst^TM 9.5 – Unified Microsoft WHQL certified graphics driver for Windows® 7 and Windows Vista®

WHQL is the word of the month for this blog; AMD was the first to introduce a fully certified single unified WHQL approved graphics driver for Windows® 7 and Windows Vista®.  By meeting Microsoft’s WHQL certification requirements in ATI Catalyst^TM 9.5 driver for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, we clearly showcase our continued focus on delivering an extremely stable and robust Win 7 experience.  First to market is important, but best to market first is how we roll at AMD in terms of graphics driver support for new operating systems.  AMD led the market with early support for Vista and now continues that graphics driver leadership with the launch of Catalyst 9.5.

All ATI Radeon^TM GPU users with an ATI Radeon HD 4000, 3000 and 2000 series product will enjoy WHQL certified support under Win 7 with ATI Catalyst 9.5.

Marketing sound bite: ATI Stream update:

<Insert Drum roll here please>

The comments section of my blog has been filled for 2 months with questions on when we were going to deliver 64-bit support for ATI AVIVO^TM technology under Windows Vista, today is the day!

With today’s release of ATI Catalyst 9.5 a number of issues that you may have previously experienced using the ATI Video Converter have been resolved! Also, ATI AVIVO technology is now supported under Windows Vista 32-bit and Windows Vista 64-bit.

Using ATI Stream technology, users of ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series and ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can take advantage of new optimizations in this video conversion tool (found in ATI Catalyst^TM Control Center Basic View) for a better experience when transcoding video files.

Game Optimizations: ATI Catalyst^TM 9.5

One of the items I want to cover each month is optimizations in games and highlighting those for you in this blog; now, I want to be honest and upfront, I intend to highlight the top games and/or optimizations but not all of them! All of the details and minutia are listed in the release notes of each ATI Catalyst Driver and that can be viewed here.

 For this month the highlights are:

• Unigine Tropics DirectX® 9 – enables performance gains for single GPU and ATI CrossFireX^TM configurations with anti-aliasing enabled. 
• Company of Heroes - enables performance gains for both single GPU and ATI CrossFireX^TM configurations. 
• BattleForge- enables performance gains for ATI CrossFireX^TM configurations. 

 And last but surely not least, my favorite community: Linux® ATI Catalyst^TM 9.5

No new features this month but a host of fixes included in this month’s release.

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.

Twist my arm, unreleased GPU meets, unreleased CPU meets unreleased Microsoft OS! When I was asked to build out a totally “unreleased product” PC and experience/blog on the tremendous gaming capabilities of such a system, I was all over it!

First things first, collect all the necessary components; as you can imagine this is a very easy task at AMD.

Components – CHECK

Chassis – Antec Skeleton (as this is easy to do quick uninstalls and reinstalls)

Birthplace – yes, we are human, even though we work and live in grey cubes

Lifting the veil!

Motherboard – Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P (AM3)

Memory – 8G Corsair XMS3 DHX DDR3 1333

CPU – Unreleased AMD Phenom™ II Quad Core (3.2Ghz)

GPU – ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 OC (unreleased at the time, available today)

OS – A super secret version of Windows 7

CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 quad core running at a stock frequency of 3.2Ghz, this CPU is scheduled to be available sometime in Q2.

The GPU is a third generation DirectX10.1 graphics card that is powered by the most powerful gaming GPU under $2601.. Availability of this GPU is April 2nd worldwide (today) and I was excited to test it early!

Some of the specs to the GPU are:

Compute Power – 1.36 TFLOPS

Core Clock Speed – 900 Mhz

Memory – GDDR5

Frame Buffer – 1G

Memory Bandwidth – 124.8 GB/s

Transistors – 959 million

Stream Processors – 800

On to the gaming experience.

Home office and test area – Yes, that is Tweetdeck open, yes that is an HP dv2 on the left and yes that is an Optimun Prime helmet beside my Master Chief helmet! Me=Geek

Just for clarity, I installed a really mature version of Windows 7 as the OS to go with the ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 software driver that we just released. This excluded me from using AMD Overdrive™ for overclocking2 or Fusion Gaming Utility3 as I did not have time to fully test these apps on Win7 (rest assured we’ll get to those in other blogs). Not to mention, I really wanted to give you a sense of the coolest gaming PC build possible!!!

If you have read any of my previous posts, you will quickly come to realize that I love Call of Duty 4: World at War, Left 4 Dead and F.E.A.R.2. These were my games of choice. As you can clearly see above, I hooked them up to one of my 30” DELL monitors and cranked all the game settings to the max. It was simply beautiful, truly cinematic HD gaming.

L4D, killing zombies on a 22” screen is boring, killing zombies while rendering with an HD4890 on a 30” screen was scary!! I have never been so stressed out while gaming (minus my first time playing DOOM).

Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!

F.E.A.R. 2, can’t say I’m tired of playing the first few levels of this game, especially on such a massive screen with so much horsepower!Between the CPU and GPU, F.E.A.R 2 purred along at 2560×1600 without a hitch, flicker or anomaly! It was the way the game was meant to be played! (no pun intended here)

Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!

The experience of CoD4 WaW was awe-inspiring! Nothing like running into a fox hole – gun a’blazin’ (or in this case, flame thrower a’flamin’) without the distraction of load times or annoying interruptions from hitches and flickers!

Did I mention the system was almost silent, it was cool and quiet!

If you are a hard core gamer looking for the best GPU value in the market – and when I say value I do not mean cheap or thrifty, I mean hardnosed best product for the money – the ATI Radeon HD 4890 needs to be a consideration! Market leading performance, exceptional price AND actual availability on launch day! No PR gimmicks here folks, no paper launches, no “ball and cup” games, just innovative product, with industry leading features built by gamers for gamers!

Don’t take my word for it; here are some very reputable 3rd party review sites to verify my experience!

“Editor’s choice Enthusiast Gold Award”

Mark Warner, Brent Justice, HardOCP

“Bon” Award (performance 4/5, features 4/5)

“It is hardly known if the GTX 275 will be available in volume or at the price promised”

Clubic.com (France)

“It is not a completely new design, but the Radeon HD 4890 is an exciting product nonetheless. To put it simply, the Radeon HD 4890 is the fastest, single-GPU powered graphics card AMD has ever produced. And its competitive pricing and overclocking headroom should further its appeal amongst enthusiasts.”

“HotHardware Recommended Award”

Marco Chiappetta, HotHardware.com

Now, I need to get back to gaming on this beautiful piece of engineering…until next blog!

(BTW: I respond to most all comments personally, catch me here or on Twitter)

Cheers!

Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton

1 Internal calculations show that the ATI Radeon HD 4890 delivers 1.36 TFLOPs of raw compute power. Third-party testing shows that the fastest competing GPU, the GeForce GTX 280 graphics processor, delivers 1.06 TFLOPs of raw compute power. http://www.gpureview.com/GeForce-GTX-285-card-605.html.

2 AMD product warranty does not cover damage caused by performance tuning, even when enabled using AMD software.

3 THIS UTILITY MAY DISABLE SECURITY / ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE, OR ADVERSELY AFFECT YOUR SYSTEM. REVIEW ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING

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.

             As I thought of new and exciting topics for this blog, it dawned on me last week (while I was chatting with Terry Makedon – the “father” of the ATI Catalyst^TM software suite) that we don’t say enough about all the great features and benefits of our monthly driver update. So starting in March and every month after I intend to write a blog outlining all the great performance improvements and features that come with the monthly driver release.

Marketing sound bite: ATI Catalyst^TM 9.3 driver - the industries first Unified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista

I like it when it’s easy and for you gamers that means you now have a single ATI Catalyst driver for both Microsoft Vista and Windows 7.  This driver allows you to swap back and forth between OSs with the same driver set; it makes for an easy, clean Windows 7 experience – without the hassle of multiple drivers, versions, etc.

 Another exciting part about a unified driver is that moving forward our ATI software gurus plan to continue to deliver a single unified driver for Windows Vista and Windows 7. Great news for all!

 Also, ATI Catalyst delivers full WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) 1.1 support under Windows 7 for all ATI Radeon^TM HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 series of graphics cards. So, in benefit speak, this new WDDM 1.1 support utilizes DirectX 10 rather than DirectX 9 and can cut down your GPU memory usage by half when opening up multiple windows thereby enabling increased performance.

Marketing sound bite: ATI Catalyst 9.3 Folding@Home performance enhancements *

Here is a very noble cause improvement, Folding@Home.  You’ll experience outstanding Folding@Home scores when running ATI Catalyst 9.3 and the most recent F@H client.  We utilize ATI Stream technology which means you must have an ATI Radeon^TM HD 4000, HD 3000 or HD 2000 series GPU to take full advantage of these enhancements.

And last but surely not least, my favorite community: Linux ATI Catalyst 9.3

We have support for new operating systems:

• RedFlag DT 6.0 sp2 production support
• RedFlag DT 7.0 support (early look)
• SLED and SLES 11 support (early look)

So, what does this all really mean, to you, the gamer?  It is a continued commitment from us to deliver monthly updates for your ATI Radeon based GPUs.  It means that you will have ease of driver management during the introduction of Windows 7 and it means an improved experience with Windows 7 and of course, if you are a Linux user, a broader set of platform support.

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. 

*Download the appropriate client

1. For CPU http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download
2. For GPU http://folding.stanford.edu/English/DownloadWinOther
3. For Playstation 3 its in your system menu already

Join team 51394 after you install and run the client for the first time.