ati-radeon posts

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.

While some people are still waiting for Nvidia to launch their high end DirectX 11 graphic chip, AMD continues to add to their library of ATI Radeon graphics chips that support DirectX 11-based games. Today AMD announced the launch of their ATI Radeon HD 5670 chip. Graphics cards with the chip will sell for under $100, giving even cheapskates a way to upgrade their PC for DirectX 11 gaming.

AMD claims that in performance tests the 5670 outperforms the card's direct competition by over 20 percent in some high end games. The new card also supports the ATI Eyefinity tech which lets gamers hook up to three monitors to one video card. In other words you will be able to play Casino Kingdom on this card without any trouble.

Since the launch of DirectX11 last fall, it's only been available for destop PC graphics cards. Today during CES, AMD announced plans to launch the first DirectX11-supported graphics chips for notebooks. Due out in notebooks sometime in the first half of this year, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 family of chips will extend DirectX11 from budget notebooks to high end gaming PCs.

AMD claims that the upcoming ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 graphics chip is the first such chip for notebook PCs that breaks the teraFLOPS performance barrier. The new chips will also support other ATI graphics chips features such as the multi-monitor Eyefinity support. In related news, AMD has announced that they have shipped 2 million DirectX11 supported graphics chips to its partners.

It's yet another case of a double whammy of graphics card driver updates today. AMD's ATI unit has just released their official Catalyst 9.12 drivers for their Radeon based video cards. The release notes for their final major driver release have all the details about what's new and improved including a slight performance boost for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. By the way, there's also supposed to be a beta patch that will fix the ATI issues with running The Saboteur on Friday.

ATI's biggest rival Nvidia has also released new beta drivers for its GeForce family of graphics chips today. Among other things the 195.81 beta drivers add new SLI support for a number of recently released PC game demos such as the demos for Avatar and Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising.

AMD has been promoting its ATI Eyefinity multi-monitor technology for a few months now and today the hardware company announced that BioWare's recently released RPG Dragon Age: Origins now supports the technology. As you can see above the game is running on three monitors with a total resolution that's a whopping 5760x1200. In fact AMD states the maximum resolution the game support with the technology is 7680 x 1600. You can check out a video of the game running with the multi-monitor tech after the jump.

AMD has really taken advantage of its current lead in high end PC graphics. The company is still the only one that has video cards that support DirectX11. Meanwhile its main rival Nvidia has been quiet about their next-generation graphics plans and as we reported last week Intel has abandoned its plans, at least for now, to re-enter the high end graphics market.

Gallery: Dragon Age Origins Screenshots

Looks like the PC release of The Saboteur is giving some folks problems. Specifically owners of ATI Radeon-based PC game rigs are reporting issues running the open world WWII action game from Pandemic and EA with Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems.

Pandemic's official message board states that the team is aware of the issue and "are working as fast as possible to find a solution." They do have a workaround that will allow people to play the game but at a huge cost; you will have to turn off all but one of your PC's CPU cores. The post offers up exactly how to do this for your PC if you are so inclined but this is obviously a pretty drastic measure to take.

AMD is leading the way with offering DirectX11-based graphics chips under the ATI Radeon brand. Next week the first game in the US with DirectX11 support out of the box, DiRT 2, is due to be released. However it seems that AMD couldn't get CrossFireX support into its latest monthly Catalyst driver updates for the game.

That's why AMD has made the decision to release a ATI driver hotfix update that enables CrossFireX support for DiRT 2. In theory, that should allow the game to have the support of more than one graphics card which should also increase the game's performance on CrossFireX-based PC rig. Meanwhile DiRT 2 for the PC makes its debut on December 1.

It's a double whammy of graphics card update goodness today. AMD's ATI unit has just released their official Catalyst 9.11 drivers for their Radeon based video cards. The release notes have all the details about the new drivers which include some bug fixes for games like Tom Clancy's HAWX, Wolfenstein and World in Conflict.

Not to be outdone, ATI's main rival Nvidia has released new beta drivers for its GeForce family of graphics chips today. Among other things the beta drivers add new SLI support for a number of recently released PC games such as Borderlands, Modern Warfare 2, and others.

We suspected that AMD might wait until the Windows 7 launch date to release its regular monthly driver updates for its ATI Radeon graphics cards, and we were right. The Catalyst 9.10 drivers are now available for download from AMD's gaming web site.

The release notes for the new drivers give the 411 on what's new, improved and fixed in this release. One of the new features is a new anti-aliasing method called Super Sampling that AMD claims will improve image quality for its ATI Radeon HD 5800 graphics card (the only ones that currently support DirectX11) while still allowing for solid performance. There are also some bugs addressed for games like Ghostbusters and Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.