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
Summary: I think we're both hoping for performance that we've already received.
I don't unistall or anything, just install the new drivers. Bada boom.
downloading/installing now :)
improvements to situations with CPU limitations is :D and :O - hell, i'm CPU bottlenecked til around 4.2Ghz, so this is great news.
edit: the installer went bad and hung on the HDMI audio driver, making me have to reboot the machine.
edit 2:
Scaling is still there, however it still has the bugs where it remains greyed out.
the bug seems somewhat improved, as i only need to drop to 1680x1050 to get scaling options now instead of 1280x1024 like in 9.7
Tom clancys HawX was a lot better at max settings the stutter seems to have gone and again the game is a lot smoother.
haven't tryed anything else yet and also have extyra ram in the pc now so maybe thats why some games feel a bit better to.
so far tho i can't see any probs with the new drivers and if anythiong there defo better.
Race driver grid seems to run a lot smoother to so im thinking its mainly down to the faster and extra 2 gig of ram i have rather than the drivers but the drivers work good so far no probs at all.
as I don't think it ever has for dvi? :o (or i just never noticed it win7 btw) Imo its the card that would casue stuttering for you, people only complain of stuttering with x-fire cos of bad drivers meaning every now and then a big dipping in the framerates and back up again meant it stuttered i jsut have a feeling your gpu isnt powerful enough :/ (no offence?) try running a few lower settings could be its just filled up the memory on the card or something
(also try ocing processor a bit as it's quite a demanding game)
anyways don't play that game much lol as for everything else it all runs nice atm.
Also, most DX10 games on the market are poorly made - they're a patch on top of a DX9 game.
gonna have a look into it.
cheers :D
i played far cry 2 the other day with my new HD 4870, and i got none of the stutter feel some of you talk of, smooth at butter.
==Company of Heroes v1.71 DX10: ultra settings(high for ones that can't go ultra)/8xAA/1680x1050
9.7
Avg: 30.756 - Min: 9 - Max: 60
9.8
Avg: 41.502 - Min: 13 - Max: 59
==Stalker CLear Sky
9.7
Avg: 36.113 - Min: 22 - Max: 49
9.8
Avg: 37.963 - Min: 26 - Max: 46
EDIT: SCS settings
So company of heroes got a nice improvement in FPS, which is awesome as i'm just now starting to pick the game up again n learning to play at its quite different from most RTS where its amass a huge force. Clear Sky i couldn't notice much of a difference, but apparently my minimum rates should be better yet max lower? haha either way i'm happy with it as there's sure to be bug fixes and whatnot as well.
for those of u that don't know, sun quality is right after steep parallex in scs settings
Got my new BenQ monitor with scaling truns out to be the saving grace :respect:
At lease no crappy drivers needed for now :p
friendscrewednah i hope they fix it soon... as soon as they admit there is a problem.
benchmark has not changed since DX10 was added, i actually tested that recently. No game patches for CoH have altered performance, at least not as far as the in game benchmark goes.