AMD today made ATI Catalyst 9.8 driver suite available to the masses through its proper channel of posting it on the AMD Game portal, complete with related documentation. The company released the software last friday to readers of the company blog, just so it could loosely coincide with the bulk of activity during Quakecon 2009, when the company also carried out a series of private demonstrations of its upcoming DirectX 11 compliant graphics hardware to sections of the media.

Catalyst 9.8 has an unusually long changelog this time around, which can be attributed to two important changes: a series of CrossFireX performance enhancements that are game-specific, and the inclusion of OpenGL 3.1 support.

Performance Enhancements:

• Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance improves up to 15-50% in CPU limited settings with the largest gains in CrossfireX configurations.
• Company of Heroes DirectX 10 performance improves by up to 10-77% in CPU limited settings.
• Crysis DirectX 10 Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 10% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 34% in CPU limited settings.
• Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 7% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 69% in CPU limited settings.
• Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 50% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 88% in CPU limited settings.
• Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 Dual CrossfireX performance improves up to 40% in CPU limited settings with Quad CrossfireX performance improving up to 60%.
• UnigineTropics OpenGL performance improves 5-20%
• UnigineTropics DirectX 10 Quad CrossfireX performance improves 5-20% in CPU limited settings.
• World in Conflict DirectX 10 performance improves by 5-10%.

OpenGL 3.1 Support

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

The complete Release Notes document for ATI Catalyst 9.8, that covers a list of fixed and known issues, can be read here.

Pick Catalyst 9.8 for your version of Windows below.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 9.8 Driver Suite for Windows 7 and Vista 32-bit | Windows 7 and Vista 64-bit | Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit