ati-radeon 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.

In 2006, PC processor maker AMD made huge headlines with its acquisition of the ATI PC graphics chip and card business for $5.4 billion. Now, four years later, AMD has decided the ATI brand name has served its purpose and will phase out the use of the ATI brand name later this year.

While the ATI brand is going away, AMD will still retain the Radeon brand for its consumer graphics chips and boards. All of AMD's current graphics products will still have the ATI brand, presumably until they are phased out. According to AnandTech, AMD is also simplifying its brands across the board in 2011 with the Vision name as the only one that will be used for all of its CPU products.

So we got a couple of new game reveals today and a big old fashioned internet argument about game patches and bugs. Just another day on the PC gaming news front:

• Want to see your idea for a player model hat actually show up in Team Fortress 2? Well we have a contest for you.
• AMD has released new Catalyst drivers (10.8 version) for its ATI Radeon graphics cards. The update includes official support for anti-aliasing in StarCraft II.
• A new and minor update for the Mac Steam client has been released along with a Garry's Mod update.
• The BioShock.com URL is not owned by publisher Take Two and now it looks like it never will be.

The PC processor and graphics chip maker AMD is in a bit of a pickle. It makes processors that are second to Intel in terms of market share and while its ATI division has been making progress on its biggest rival Nvidia in terms of performance Nvidia's graphic chips are still the market leader for PC gaming. Now AMD has announced a new marketing program that's aimed specifically at PC gamers.

The marketing program is called Gaming Evolved and according to AMD's web site, the program is all about one thing, "Gamers Come First". The site adds, "We will listen carefully to gamers, create solutions and technologies that closely align to their wants and needs, and fulfill our "Gamers Come First!" mandate to the PC gamers of the world." The site also says AMD will listen to game developers as well, saying, "We will deliver the technical support and guidance needed to adopt new technologies like Direct X 11, and provide the indispensible business support that game developers need to help make their games a commercial success"." Big Download plans to contact AMD to get more concrete info on what its new Gaming Evolved program will mean to the PC games industry.

AMD's ATI graphics division is doing things a little earlier than normal this month with the release of their regular monthly update to its Catalyst drivers for their Radeon graphics chips. The 10.6 version of the drivers are now available to download via the AMD Game web site.

The release notes for the 10.6 drivers reveals that the new version has a number of PC games that get performance boosts if you have a CrossfireX PC set-up. Among the games that get some performance improvements are Batman: Arkham Asylum, Company of Heroes, Dirt 2, Crysis Warhead and World in Conflict.

[Via Blue's News]

So you want to upgrade your gaming PC with a new graphics card but you have also heard some good things about Bigfoot Networks' line of gaming oriented network cards too. Well, how about if you got both on one card? Our sister site Engadget is reporting from Computex that Bigfoot Networks is going to do just that with a currently unnamed product that combines its recently launched Killer 2100 gaming network card with an ATI Radeon 5000 series-based graphics card from a company called TLU.

The company is showing off a prototype of the product which it says will cost less than if you had to buy each card separately. The final product should be released later this year. Engadget's story also hints that Bigfoot would like to see its network card technology in gaming laptops and in motherboards in the future. It's also looking to bring its low ping network tech to WiFi sometime in 2011.

It's time for yet another monthly graphics driver update from the folks at AMD via their ATI unit. The newly released Catalyst 10.5 drivers are now available to download via AMD's Game web site. The drivers for the ATI Radeon graphics chips are available for Windows XP, Vista and 7 users in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.

The release notes for the new drivers reveal the driver's new features and more importantly the driver's various bug fixes for quite a number of recent PC games. The titles with bug fixes include Alien vs. Predator, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Mass Effect 2, Napoleon: Total War, and Splinter Cell Conviction. The bug fixes for the games sometimes depend on which version of Windows you currently use.

With just a couple of days to go before the end of April, AMD has at last released the final and official 10.4 version of their ATI Catalyst graphics drivers for their Radeon graphics card products. A preview version of the drivers was released earlier this month that fixed some large level load times for Battlefield Bad Company 2.

The release notes give all the details on what's new and cool with these 10.4 drivers. The new drivers have some small performance gains in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky and fix some bugs in a number of games such as Shattered Horizon and Napoleon Total War.

AMD has been promoting their Eyefinity technology in their ATI Radeon cards that allows one of their cards to run up to three monitors. Today AMD announced their latest card, the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition. As you can guess from the "6" in the product title, this graphic card is the first to allow up to six monitors to be run with just one card installed in your PC.

While AMD didn't announce a price for this card a quick check of the internet shows that the product is going for $700 or more on retail sites. Reviews of the card on hardware web sites have been a little mixed with some saying playing games with six monitors can be a pain with the bezels of the various monitors obscuring critical parts of the game's viewpoint.

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]