Friday, August 14th 2009
AMD Sneaks in ATI Catalyst 9.8 Driver Suite
Without much of a buzz except past leaks suggesting that the company would roll out a beta at this year's Quakecon, AMD released the ATI Catalyst 9.8 WHQL driver suite to readers of the company blog, before formally announcing it and adding it to the AMD Game portal. The package installs drivers for ATI Radeon graphics hardware, including its discrete and integrated graphics processors, AMD 7-series chipsets, and ATI Theater series multimedia products.
With lack of proper documentation (read: release notes) at hand, there are no specifics available about the driver, though one could expect the usual application/hardware/OS-specific enhancement, a possibly expanded supported products list with new SKUs in the Radeon HD 4700/4800 series that surfaced over the last month.
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
With lack of proper documentation (read: release notes) at hand, there are no specifics available about the driver, though one could expect the usual application/hardware/OS-specific enhancement, a possibly expanded supported products list with new SKUs in the Radeon HD 4700/4800 series that surfaced over the last month.
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
57 Comments on AMD Sneaks in ATI Catalyst 9.8 Driver Suite
and from ive seen i think there may also be OpenGl improvements. Like using GPU caps viewer, its now reporting a geometry shader, and from i remember there wasnt one. I played Quake 4 and it didnt crash on me like it usually did, so they must have done something with the OGL driver.
Don't know about trying these lol.. Think i'll wait and stay on 9.6's as the 9.7's were crap when over clocking the GPU.
Seem good so far only tried GTA 4 and GPUTool and no issue's.
This month we are seeing a massive performance increase with a whole host of games as compared to the ATI Catalyst 9.7 driver. Detailed release notes are available for most of the game optimizations; here are the highlights:
•Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance improves of up to 50% with the largest gains in configurations using ATI CrossFireX™ technology.
•Company of Heroes DirectX 10 performance improves of up to 77%.
•Crysis DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 10% and quad mode performance improves of up to 34%.
•Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 7% and quad mode performance improves of up to 69%.
•Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 50% and quad mode performance improves of up to 88%.
•Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 40% and with quad mode performance improving of up to 60%.
•UnigineTropics OpenGL performance improvements of up to 20%.
•UnigineTropics DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in quad mode improvements of up to 20%.
•World in Conflict DirectX 10 performance improvements of up to by 10%.
This release of the ATI Catalyst driver provides OpenGL 3.1 extension support. The following is a list of OpenGL 3.1 features and extensions added in ATI Catalyst 9.8:
•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 Nvidia 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. o 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). o Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object).
•SNORM texture component formats.
good stuff
I think drivers should at least be 80 to 90% of what they can be after 6 month tops.
Only a complete haulover of their driver team could explaine it I think..
Here is 9.7 with 4890/4850 1GB Crossfire setup:
And here is 9.8 with the same 4890/4850 1GB Crossfire setup:
EDIT: It appears the people without Core i7s are seeing the greatest improvement, ie: the min framerate increases. I think this driver release is supposed to improve CPU scaling.
EDIT EDIT: Nevermind, driver release is aimed at pure Crossfire setups or to CPU scaling perhaps?
read post #12 on this thread.
forums.techpowerup.com/showpost.php?p=1515530&postcount=12