catalyst posts

It's less than two weeks away from the big day. Have you sent out your holiday cards yet? Yeah, we haven't either. We've been too busy with getting some end-of-the-year features ironed out.

• AMD has just released new 10.12 Catalyst driver updates for its Radeon series of graphics cards.
• Steam has a new Guardians of Graxia patch update available to download.
• If the Call of Duty games were ever adapted into one of those Lego-style game, this is what it might (sort of) look like.
• StarCraft II's list of the top 200 players in North America has been updated again.
• It was inevitable: WikiLeaks: The (Flash) Game.

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.

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]

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 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.

While it's running a few days late, AMD has now released its regular monthly driver refresh for its ATI Catalyst drivers. The 9.5 version of the drivers for their ATI Radeon based card is now available for download at AMD's PC game oriented web site.

While the release notes for the drivers have yet to be revealed, AMD's blog site has some details on what's new in version 9.5. It's a WHQL approved graphics driver that support both Windows Vista and Windows 7. There are also some performace gains in both Company of Heroes (in both single and in CrossFire modes) and for Battleforge (CrossFire only).

AMD's regular monthly refresh of their ATI Radeon Catalyst drivers has been released for March. This is the first Catalyst driver release that supports Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 operating system for all of those who are using the beta release.

According to AMD's gaming blog, "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." The release notes give the full picture on what's new and improved which includes some perfomace improvements for Lost Planet: Colonies and other games.

While AMD's ATI unit is quick to release hotfixes for its graphics drivers for specific games like Far Cry 2, they usually reserve major new updates to their Catalyst drivers for the middle of the month. Today is no exception as the company has released their 8.11 version of their drivers for their Radeon graphics cards.

You can check out the release notes for the latest version which reveals a number of bug fixes and improvements. In particular these new 8.11 drivers supposedly improve performance for Far Cry 2 by 3 to 10 percent for single card mode and 8 to 14 percent in Crossfire mode. Also playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky with the new drivers yielded performance gains of 6 to 18 percent in single card settings and 10 to 30 percent in CrossfireX mode.

These drivers improve performance for both S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky and Far Cry 2 on ATI Crossfire compatible systems. Patches will work in both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows XP or Vista.

Download STALKER: Clear Sky & Far Cry 2 ATI Catalyst Driver Hotfix [WinXP] (49 MB)
Download STALKER: Clear Sky & Far Cry 2 ATI Catalyst Driver Hotfix [Vista] (68 MB)

AMD released patches for the ATI Catalyst video drivers to improve Far Cry 2's DirectX 9 performance on CrossFire compatible systems. DirectX 10 performance improvements include both single card and CrossFire setups.

Download Far Cry 2 ATI Catalyst Driver Hotfix Patch [WinXP] (44 MB)
Download Far Cry 2 ATI Catalyst Driver Hotfix Patch [Vista] (65 MB)
Check out all Far Cry 2 Downloads