AMD today launched the most powerful processor ever created, found in its next-generation graphics cards, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics cards, and the world's first and only to fully support Microsoft DirectX 11, the new gaming and compute standard shipping shortly with Microsoft Windows 7 operating system. Boasting up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of compute power, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series effectively doubles the value consumers can expect of their graphics purchases, delivering twice the performance-per-dollar of previous generations of graphics products. AMD will initially release two cards: the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the ATI Radeon HD 5850, each with 1GB GDDR5 memory. With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards, PC users can expand their computing experience with ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology, accelerate their computing experience with ATI Stream technology, and dominate the competition with superior gaming performance and full support of Microsoft DirectX 11, making it a "must-have" consumer purchase just in time for Microsoft Windows 7 operating system.

"With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cars driven by the most powerful processor on the planet, AMD is changing the game, both in terms of performance and the experience," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Products Group, AMD. "As the first to market with full DirectX 11 support, an unmatched experience made possible with ATI Eyefinity technology, and ATI Stream technology harnessing open standards designed to help make Windows 7 that much better, I can say with confidence that AMD is the undisputed leader in graphics once more."

AMD released version 9.9 of its ATI Catalyst driver suite that provides drivers and related essential software for ATI Radeon graphics processors, AMD 7-series core-logic, and ATI Multimedia products. This release mainly intends to fix application-specific issues, and features related to Catalyst Control Center application. For more details, refer to the Release Notes document. Highlights include:

• Anti-Aliasing support for Ghostbusters
• ATI CrossFireX support for Resident Evil 5
• Graphics corruption fix for Sims 3
• Catalyst Control Center - Basic now responds properly after exiting Quick Adjust Video Settings
• Edge enhancement and de-noise sliders in Catalyst Control Center no longer lags or appears out of sync with mouse movement
• Launching Hotkeys Manager in Catalyst Control Center no longer causes an unhandled exception error
• The "Desktop Rotation" page in Catalyst Control Center no longer shows additional information for the second display when the secondary adapter is connected
• HDMI is now detected properly as DTV (HDMI) instead of DTV (DVI) when the HDMI display is hotplugged for the first time
• Catalyst Control Center no longer displays error message when specific HDMI displays are hot unplugged and hotplugged back
• Intermittent failures no longer occur with MediaShow Espresso once a transcoding process has been completed

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 9.9

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.

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

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

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 9.7 Driver Suite for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 7/Vista 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows XP 32-bit

AMD announced the availability of ATI Catalyst version 9.6 driver suite, that provides driver support for ATI Radeon series graphics processors (driver version 8.62), Hydravision, AMD Southbridge/Chipset driver, and Catalyst Control Center (version 8.62). The new version brings along the following application-specific performance increments:

• Company of Heores - performance gains of up to 25% for the ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series, and performance gains of up to 10% for the ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series.
• Crysis Warhead - performance gains of up to 11% for ATI CrossFireX configurations.
• Crysis - performance gains of up to 13% for ATI CrossFireX configurations.
• World in Conflict - performance gains of up to 30% for settings are were previously CPU limited.

The Linux version of this driver suite adds production support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and SLED 11. It also provides early support for RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.8.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 9.6 for Windows XP 32-bit | Windows 7/Vista 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows 7/Vista 64-bit

Release Notes can be read here

ATI has finally updated its web page to include the official WHQL version of ATI Catalyst 9.5, four days after we first informed you that the driver is ready and provided you with download links. The driver packs uploaded on the AMD servers should be exactly the same as the once we have uploaded on our page last week. Below the text separator are the final release notes and everything you need to know about the 9.5 release. This time I'll link you to AMD GAME! for downloads, but remember our links from the previous post here are still operational and can do the work.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 9.5 WHQL for Microsoft Windows XP 32-bit/64-bit, Windows Vista 32-bit/64-bit, Windows 7 32-bit/64-bit

Attention all ATI users: your Catalyst 9.5 drivers have just been released. I'm still awaiting AMD's Game website to be updated to show the info on the new Catalyst, but meanwhile direct download links with the valid new driver are working. I'll update the news as soon as some new info is available. Until then, download and enjoy the new driver release.

DOWNLOAD: Catalyst 9.5 for Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit

AMD is ready with the industry's first WHQL-certified set of drivers for Microsoft Windows 7. The Catalyst WHQL Windows 7 driver comes as yet another first for AMD, and a first for Microsoft's Windows 7 certification program. Dated 5/5/2009, the drivers carry the version 8.612, feature full support for Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.1 and works with ATI Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000, and HD 4000 series. The drivers also provide support for ATI Stream GPGPU technology.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 8.612 WHQL for Windows 7 64-bit, and Windows 7 32-bit.

AMD have just released their ATI Catalyst 9.4 Driver for Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. Highlights of the ATI Catalyst 9.4 Windows release include:

New Features

• ATI Catalyst 9.4 includes a new ATI Overdrive auto-tune application to estimate the over-clocked engine and memory values for ATI Overdrive supported ATI Radeon Graphics accelerators
  Designed for the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series

Resolved Issue Highlights

• "World of Warcraft" or "World of Warcraft - Wrath of the Lich King": Flickering no longer occurs when Shadow is set to medium/high using ATI CrossFire configurations
• Google Sketchup no longer displays blank screen
• Resolutions above 1024 x 768 will now full screen properly for specific HDMI displays
• Artifacts no longer visible while playing Age of Conan DX10
• VC-1 progressive disc playback no longer exhibits block corruption.
• The Compute Abstraction Layer (CAL) driver now functions properly under Windows XP

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst version 9.4 for Windows XP/Vista/7 (32/64-bit versions)

AMD today announced the availability of GPU PerfStudio 2.0, a free, platform-agnostic, next-generation AMD graphics application development tool for game developers, obtainable through a closed beta program. GPU PerfStudio 2.0 has been designed from the ground up to easily integrate with existing projects, and help to identify and resolve performance issues early in the development cycle. With these tools, AMD is bringing its unparalleled understanding of 3D graphics technology and the leadership of its line of ATI Radeon graphics cards to bear on the development process.

"The GPU PerfStudio 2.0 suite of tools is extensive, customizable and, most importantly, based on open standards, which is critical for developers looking to integrate them into their existing workflows," said Neal Robison, director, Developer Relations, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "AMD is committed to arming developers with a full complement of hardware and development tools that help increase their development efficiency and improve 3D performance quality."

AMD today released the latest version of their ATI video driver, Catalyst 9.3. The key addition with this release is official support for Windows 7, in the form of a unified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. As part of supporting Windows 7, Catalyst 9.3 supports WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) 1.1 for all ATI Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 series of graphics cards. According to AMD, "this new WDDM 1.1 support utilizes DirectX 10 rather than DirectX 9 and can cut down your GPU memory usage by half when opening up multiple windows thereby enabling increased performance."

AMD have said the driver brings performance benefits in several cases where framerates are CPU limited and using ATI Stream technology, owners of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of graphics accelerators will see a performance boost in their Folding@Home scores when running the latest Folding@Home client. AMD only documented one performance improvement in the release notes:

• Lost Planet: Colonies gains up to 20% on 4800 series products, and up to 50% on 4600, 4500 and 4300 series products

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst version 9.3 for Windows XP/Vista/7 (32/64-bit versions)

ATI wants to diminish the list of supported graphics cards in the next release of Catalyst. With the release of ATI Catalyst 9.4, the plan is to exclude support for Radeon 9500, 9600, 9800, X800, X1800, X1900 and other desktop video cards. Catalyst 9.4 will also lack support for the FireGL X1/X2/X3, V3000, V5000, V7000 and FireMV 2200, 2250 professional cards. Of course owners of these models will still be permitted to download older drivers and use them happily. The ATI Catalyst 9.4 is set to be released next month.

ATI's CrossFire multi-GPU technology started off on the Intel platform with ATI's own brand of chipset before AMD acquired the company. AMD/ATI then allowed CrossFire and the succeeding CrossFireX standards to be supported by Intel chipsets. The only current chipset platform that doesn't support CrossFire is the NVIDIA nForce series, which as ASRock demonstrated during the ongoing CeBIT event, breaks the dogma.

ASRock devised a BIOS for its nForce 740i based N7AD-SLI motherboard that enables support for CrossFire. AMD's Catalyst drivers were able to detect the motherboard as a qualified platform and enable CrossFire between two installed ATI Radeon accelerators. The setup was able to show performance increments during a 3DMark06 session. ASRock is reportedly working out similar BIOS firmware for several other motherboards made by it, and wants to enable CrossFire, CrossFireX for all its nForce motherboards.

The RivaTuner team today announced a new version of one of the popular graphics card performance-control and monitoring utilities. Rivatuner version 2.24 adds several new features and fixes minor bugs and issues found with the older version.

DOWNLOAD: RivaTuner v2.24

Detailed lists of bug-fixes and feature additions follow:

AMD has just released ATI Catalyst version 9.2, so now you have a brand new driver for tonight and a nice tweaking utility to test. Catalyst 9.2 brings performance benefits in several games:

• Crysis DX10 gains up to 20%
• Crysis Warhead DX10 gains up to 20%
• World in Conflict gains up to 5%

Now the new driver also enables Anisotropic Filtering for DirectX 10 applications in Windows Vista and fixes some minor issues that occured in previous versions. For the full list of fixes, please read the Catalyst 9.2 release notes.


DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst version 9.2 for Windows XP and Windows Vista (32/64-bit versions)

Although the Radeon HD 4850 X2 is an official SKU by AMD, launched (rather paper-launched) by the company along with the HD 4870 X2, Sapphire ended up being the only company to come up with an HD 4850 X2 series product line, since AMD didn't specify a reference design of its own. Sapphire went on to launch 1GB (2x 512MB) and 2GB (2x 1GB) variants of the said accelerator.

In AMD's latest release of the Catalyst driver suite (version 9.1), the HD 4850 X2 was excluded from the supported hardware list. Instead the company now released a special release of Catalyst 9.1 for the Radeon HD 4850 X2 series. The driver provides the same feature-set and list of fixes as described in the original release notes document for Catalyst 9.1, albeit being specific for the said accelerator. The WHQL-signed drivers are available for Windows Vista and Windows XP operating systems from the AMD website here.

AMD today released its timely update to the ATI Catalyst system drivers package that provides drivers driver support for ATI Radeon graphics accelerators, AMD 7-series chipset with integrated graphics. The drivers are effictive for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux operating systems.

The new release expands the feature-set of the ATI Catalyst, along with a set of fixes as described in the release notes (PDF). The fixes mostly revolve around Catalyst Control Center and the video acceleration features of the driver. To begin with, the new driver provides full OpenGL 3.0 support, including a few new GL extensions. The release also favours Linux by providing support for Hybrid CrossFireX. More importantly, the Linux version of the driver, provides MultiView support, that enables using independent display-heads on setups with multiple ATI GPUs. It is supported by any combination of ATI Radeon GPUs, Radeon HD 2000 series and later.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 9.1 for Windows XP (32bit) | Windows XP (64bit) | Windows Vista (32bit) | Windows Vista (64bit)

Yesterday ATI released two updates to its Catalyst driver package, the one is actually being a whole new driver for Windows 7. The ATI Catalyst preview driver for Windows 7 includes drivers for all Radeon HD 2000, 3000 and 4000 series GPUs plus the ATI Catalyst Control Center with limited features support.
The ATI Catalyst release 8.12 hotfix is said to improve DirectX10 performance in various applications in multi-core CPU systems. It also resolves the BSOD issues using dual ATI Radeon HD 4850 in CrossFire mode.

DOWNLOAD: Windows 7 Preview Driver | ATI Catalyst release 8.12 HOTFIX

Empowering consumers to get elite-level computing performance for under $900 U.S. dollars, AMD today launched "Dragon" platform technology for desktop PCs featuring the new AMD Phenom II X4 processor. Even the most demanding users such as enthusiasts and high-end gamers desire affordable systems capable of delivering HD entertainment, graphic-intensive game play at the highest settings their monitors can handle, as well as quick and easy transfer of video entertainment to and from mobile devices. Dragon platform technology provides the power to do it all by combining AMD's highest-performing CPU, the AMD Phenom II X4 processor, with award winning ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series graphics and AMD 7-Series chipsets. And it's offered at an incredible value with Dragon-based systems available for up to $1,200 U.S. dollars less than competing systems that deliver comparable performance.

Leading global PC manufacturers HP, Dell and Alienware plan to offer Dragon platform technology-based desktop systems in the first quarter of 2009, with Dell offering immediate availability in its Dell XPS desktop line. "The XPS 625 desktop powered by AMD's Dragon platform technology features new AMD Phenom II processors to enable a significant boost in speed for enhanced gaming, as well as the flexibility to enable multi-tasking and HD video capabilities free from delays, stalls and lags," said Arthur Lewis, general manager of Dell Gaming Group. "The XPS 625 gives gamers the unbelievable experience they expect at a price point that won't break the bank."

ATI programmers have released a hotfix that corrects the black screen and boot OS failure when Catalyst 8.12 is installed on Windows Vista, and two or more ATI Radeon HD 4850 video cards are working in CrossFire X mode. This issue only occurs when two or more ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphic cards are installed in the system with ATI CrossFireX technology. One single ATI Radeon HD 4850 card will not encounter this issue. To download the hotfix for both Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit, please click here.

ATI has just released this year's final version of its Catalyst driver package. As you might already know from our previous BETA release post, with the release of ATI Catalyst 8.12 users can now unlock the potential of accelerated applications enabling ATI Stream technology for various ATI Radeon graphics processors. This release also adds Stream technology to ATI's AVIVO Video Converter and many performance improvements.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 8.12

It's already December, time for a new ATI Catalyst 8.12 driver. It's still a little bit early for the final driver release though, but a Beta version is already available, and now we know some inside information of what this driver will bring very soon. Here's a little sneak preview, with Catalyst 8.12 ATI will land its Stream support for Radeon video cards. The CAL (Compute Abstraction Layer) is now included in the Catalyst driver package. CAL is the enabling component for ATI Stream. Catalyst 8.12 is also said to bring Stream technology to ATI Avivo Video Converter, for enhanced video transcoding. For good or for bad, only ATI Radeon HD 4800 and Radeon HD 4600 series support this tool. At last, Catalyst 8.12 comes with many game performance improvements (read more below). Here's the link to the Catalyst 8.12 Beta version, the final release is coming soon. We'll inform you when it is available.

AMD has released an ATI Catalyst driver hotfix, Catalyst 8.11 with Intel X58 i7 Driver, that aims to improve performance on Intel X58 platfoms with ATI graphics accelerator installed. The X58-specific optimizations would also be part of next month's Catalyst 8.12 release. The hotfix applies to all discrete graphics cards, ATI Radeon X1000 series and later. The game-specific improvements are universal (helps everyone). A concise list of improvements this hotfix brings about as listed by AMD is as follows:

• Improves performance in various Direct3D and OpenGL applications on the X58 platform. AMD's next official ATI Catalyst release (ATI Catalyst 8.12) will include these optimizations
• Improves performance for the DirectX 9 version of Far Cry 2 on CrossFire compatible systems
• Improves performance for the DirectX 10 version of Far Cry 2 on both single and CrossFire compatible systems
• Improves performance for the DirectX 10 and DirectX 10.1 version of Stalker Clear Sky on both single and CrossFireX configurations at higher resolutions
• Brothers in Arms - Hells Highway no longer displays corruption on the 'Black Friday' level.

DOWNLOAD: for Windows XP (32/64-bit) | for Windows Vista (32/64-bit). More information can be found here.

I'm happy to inform you that ATI has just posted links to its latest Catalyst version 8.11 WHQL drives. This release of ATI Catalyst enables users to verify whether an application is running in ATI CrossFireX mode. The new option found in the ATI Catalyst Control Center system tray, will allow users to verify whether a Direct3D or OpenGL application is running in ATI CrossFireX mode and display "ATI Cross-FireX" logo on screen when the application is actually running. This release also includes some performance enhancements (on all Radeon HD04xxx and Radeon HD3xxx products) that improve Far Cry 2 gameplay from 3 to 10% for single card mode and 8 to 14% in CrossFire configuration. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky game also gains 6 to 18% performance in single card settings and 10 to 30% in CrossfireX mode.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 8.11 WHQL