Driver ATI Catalyst 9.8 disponibili per il download

Sono disponibili i nuovi driver ATI Catalyst release 9.8, compatibili con schede video ATI Radeon dalla serie HD 2000 in poi, per sistemi operativi Windows XP, Vista e 7 in versioni a 32bit e a 64bit.

I nuovi driver contengono ottimizzazioni specifiche che incrementano le prestazioni con vari titoli, in tutte quelle situazioni nelle quali i frames sono principalmente limitati dalla potenza di elaborazione del processore; condizione di partenza è che il sistema sia basato su piattaforma AMD Dragon e venga utilizzata la tecnologia CrossFireX, con la quale due o più GPU sono affiancate per operare in parallelo nella generazione di una scena 3D.

Il download dei driver è accessibile in locale da questo indirizzi:

• Catalyst 9.8 Windows Vista 32bit
• Catalyst 9.8 Windows Vista 64bit
• Catalyst 9.8 Windows XP 32bit
• Catalyst 9.8 Windows XP 64bit

Di seguito alcune delle note fornite a corredo con i driver:

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™ 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%.

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. o 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). o Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object).
• SNORM texture component formats.