AMD today released its latest official version of Catalyst, a software suite that provides drivers for AMD/ATI Radeon graphics processors, A-Series APUs, 7-series and 8-series integrated graphics, and related system software. Catalyst 11.10 WHQL launched today has essentially the same change log as the 11.10 Preview 3 driver, except that it's WHQL-signed. Catalyst 11.10 WHQL is the driver to have when playing some of the latest titles such as Battlefield 3 and Rage.

Catalyst 11.10 WHQL brings in a few new features, too, such as support for 5x1 Eyefinity, with maximum resolution increased to 16000 x 16000 pixels on Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs, and in DirectX 11 applications, and improved Vision Engine Control Center / Catalyst Control Center applications (VECC is installed for A-Series APUs and Chipset IGPs, CCC is installed for discrete Radeon GPUs).

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.10 WHQL for Windows 7 and Vista 64-bit | Windows 7 and Vista 32-bit

NVIDIA announced today the expansion of its award-winning line of NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions based on the NVIDIA Fermi architecture. The mid-range Quadro 2000 with 192 NVIDIA CUDA processing cores and the entry-level Quadro 600 with 96 CUDA processor cores now bring the computational and visualization benefits of the breakthrough Fermi architecture to all segments of the market.

The Quadro 2000 delivers 1.5 times the geometry performance of the previous Quadro graphics processing unit (GPU) mid-range solution and utilizes the new NVIDIA Scalable Geometry Engine technology to deliver dramatically higher performance across leading CAD and DCC applications such as SolidWorks and Autodesk 3ds Max.

A new satellite, dubbed WorldView I, is to be launched on Tuesday that will provide Google with sharper images for its Google Earth program. Together with the company's existing Quickbird satellite, Google will be able to collect 600,000 square kilometers of high-resolution imagery each day compared to only that amount previously each week.

An interesting new Easter egg has been discovered in the latest version of Google Earth which offers users a nifty little free little flight simulator. By pressing Control+Alt+A (actually, for me it only worked by using Control+A, so try that if pressing all three keys doesn't work) you can open a flight sim dialogue which will let to choose between the F16 "Viper" aircraft or the SR22, and allow you to select where you would like to start from a number of global airports. You only have to use this shortcut once - after the first time you can simply go to the "Tools" menu and click on "Enter Flight Simulator..." to run it. Admittedly it isn't the best flight sim out there, but if you get a bit bored at work and would like something to do, this could give you a few hours of entertainment before the IT technicians find out. This will only work with version 4.2 (including the free version) of Google Earth. For a full list of controls, go here.

Finally it seems that the ones who like to use Google Earth and Google Maps will get to see images of earth updated more frequently due to the aquisition of ImageAmerica by Google.

I'm pleased to announce that we have acquired ImageAmerica, a company that builds high resolution cameras for the collection of aerial imagery. Google Maps and Earth users are no strangers to ImageAmerica's work -- the company provided high resolution black and white imagery of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. We're excited about how ImageAmerica's technology will contribute to our mapping services down the road. Since we're in the research and development phase right now it may be some time before you see any of this imagery in Google Maps or Earth.