Wednesday, July 22nd 2009
AMD Releases ATI Catalyst 9.7 Driver Suite
AMD today sneaked in the latest version of its ATI Catalyst driver suite that provides support to several AMD/ATI components such as ATI Radeon series GPUs, AMD desktop chipsets, AMD FireStream GPGPU, and ATI Theater multimedia products. As revealed by the release notes document, AMD introduced several performance and feature-set changes, along with timely bug-fixes. Highlights include:
- Crysis performance at very high quality preset increases by up to 8% on Radeon HD 4800 series
- Lost Planet Colonies - performance increases by 7-11% when 8x Anti-Aliasing is used on the HD 4800 series products
- Introduces support for the ATI Video converter under Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit
- A newly designed Desktops & Displays Manager
- Added support for new OpenGL extensions: EXT_provoking_vertex and EXT_vertex_array_bgra
71 Comments on AMD Releases ATI Catalyst 9.7 Driver Suite
1. Damn. i dont really like it.
2. Another reason to tell XP users to get with the times
XP gives a tad higher clock then the later.... I agree it only gets better with upgrades.. +UPDATES :rolleyes:
:rockout:
I don't like either of them.
Folding@home seems stable, at least so far.
Haven't done any benchmarks yet.
The one and only game i was going to play in even DX10 was Alen Wake and look whats happened to that.
I have a copy of Vista of MS for free when they were giving them away so if a odd game does come DX10 only i be just fine :).
and I am not win7 fan, incase it came off that way, I use server 2008 and love it :)
MS also gave me vista ultimate, I hated it(pre service pack) and traded it to a friend who now dosnt use it because he to is on server 2008 :)
I've had 3 issue in total which have been game issue's with dumb setup installers which is also fixable too.
I heard a load of people having issue's with it like for scanners and printers and stuff.
I'll use it as long as i can till forced to change as i am a avid gamer but till now at least there has been no reason and cannot justify spending more cash on a OS just to get a tweaked version of Vista with DX11 as seen as there's no game yet maybe in a year there might be a hand full..
Maybe by then Vista will have DX11.
Now if Win7 had a version were EVERY thing was stripped out of it and i do mean every thing and was aim just for games i would have a different thoughts about it.
But anyways 9.7's been working ok in games for me except with GPUTool which from time to time will give me a error when testing for stability.
Still have the issue in SOME games scaling issue's and refresh rate has to be changed and game has to be ran once then the refresh rate can be set back to 60hz again.
How i see this is a game issue and possibly a driver\CCC issue. A Game called Trine worked fine till they changed some thing in their 1.2 patch. But a quick change of refresh rate solves it permanently as far as i can tell.
If you run mainstream hardware from big companies (and no extra peripherals) then you should be ok. That said, vista x64 and 7x64 have a lot better driver support than xp 64 ever did.
My game pad works(Fang), joystick, printer, Track IR 3\4, Diamondback mouse, iPod, camera and UPS works perfectly.
Maybe i'm just one of the lucky ones. If i was using XP 32bit then that be a whole different matter and would be either using Vista x64 or thinking of getting Win7.
2. webcams dont get driver updates, the companies tend to view them as desposible devices you should just buy a new one of(bastards)
3. tv tuners, alot dont have "official" x64 drivers, but if you look up the chip and dig around with google a bit, there are drivers for most conextant/rockwell and other common chip based cards, the card makers just dont post them because they want you to buy a new card.
3. printers, if its a ltp/para port printer you can easly get it working, if its USB you can normally get it working at least in a basic fashion using a generic usb print driver, wont have all the features of a full driver, but u can print.
4. scaners, yet another device that companies see as disposable, and just want you to buy a new one, any time a new OS comes out that changes driver models you endup needing a new one 9/10 times.
yeah there are devices that dont have x64 drivers, but enlarge the same devices lack vista drivers, and if you go back in time, alot of devices that worked on 9x or nt4 didnt ever get 2k or xp drivers :(
Not really MS's fault but the device makers being bastards, my advice if you dont like that crap, dont buy from companies that do it, and email them letting them know why you wont buy their products again.