ati-catalyst posts

Up until now Valve's Steam download service has been mostly for downloading games, demos, movies and strategy guides. Today it was announced that the service will be used by processor maker AMD for another purpose. If you have an ATI Radeon-based graphics card in your PC, Steam will automatically detect that and make available the latest driver updates for your graphics card.

This will certainly be a huge benefit for Steam owners which those graphics cards since many issues with PC games can be solved with a graphics driver update. The updates will begin later this month with the release of the 10.9 version of the Catalyst drivers. Ironically this announcement comes on the heals of the word that AMD intends to dump the ATI brand name for its graphics cards by the end of the year.

Update: Those 10.9 drivers are now available to download via Steam and from AMD's Game web site.

While they were released in a preview form earlier this month, AMD has now released the full 10.3 version of their ATI Catalyst drivers designed for their Radeon graphics chips. Unlike the preview release, this official version now includes support for Windows XP in addition to the Windows Vista and Windows 7 versions.

The release notes for the new version shows that the new version adds support for the 2000, 3000, 4000 and 5000 series of ATI Mobility Radeon HD notebook chips. There are some performance improvements for a number of PC games in the drivers including Aliens Vs. Predator, Dirt 2, Battleforge and other games.

[Via Blue's News]

Just as Nvidia released some new beta GeForce drivers today, so did AMD with the early release of their official ATI Catalyst drivers for both desktops and notebooks (version number 10.3). This early release is for Windows Vista and Windows 7; there are no Windows XP versions available yet. This is the regular monthly update to the drivers and AMD's Underground site has the info on the big additions and changes.

There are quite a few changes and additions for AYI Eyefinity multi-monitor technology in the new drivers. There's also added support for 3D Stereoscopic glasses. The official versions, with Windows XP support, should be released later this month.

[Via Voodoo Extreme]

It's time for a new monthly release of AMD's new ATI Catalyst graphics drivers for their ATI Radeon products. However this month is a little different in that there are a couple of game-related new features that have been added to the 10.2 version of the drivers. One is a separate executable file for CrossFireX game profiles. That means if you have a PC with a CrossFireX rig you won't have to wait for the next monthly release to get up to date profiles for games that run on the system.

.The new driver release also lets CrossFireX set-ups save energy by letting the secondary GPU go down to low power levels when not being used by games. It also adds full support for the new multi-monitor Eyefinity features in CrossFireX. There are also some small performance boosts in Dirt 2, Battleforge and other games and apps with these new drivers.

The ATI graphics unit of AMD has been releasing a new regular update to their Catalyst drivers every single month for some time. Today they proved that 2010 is starting with no exception to that rule with the release of the Catalyst 10.1 version drivers for their ATI Radeon based products.

The release notes have what's new, what's changed and what's fixed in this latest driver version. The driver includes some small performance improvements for games like Left 4 Dead 2 and Crysis. A note on AMD's gaming blog site says that we can expect some "major new features and functionality into the ATI Catalyst drivers" to be added in future driver releases in the next few months.

AMD has a huge booth at QuakeCon 2009 this year but the PC chip maker is also allowing anyone at the event's BYOC booth who has an ATI based PC to download the newest Catalyst 9.8 drivers. Officially the drivers wlll be released next week.

But that's not all. AMD's QuakeCon blog has let anyone else download the same drivers ahead of the official release. Naturally they come in Windows XP, Vista and 7 flavors (both 32-bit and 64-bit). The change list is over at the PC Perspective web site where they list a ton of performace improvesments for games like Battleforge, Crysis, Far Cry 2, Company of Heroes and more.

[Via Blue's News]