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.

December ATI Catalyst Driver Release Automatically Switches on ATI Stream Acceleration in ATI Radeon Graphics Cards Found in Millions of PCs. To Enable Instant Benefit, Users Will Also Be Able to Download Free Avivo Video Converter That Makes High-Definition Video Conversion up to 17x Faster.

AMD today announced that starting next month, the company plans to release for download a free ATI Catalyst driver update that instantly unlocks new ATI Stream acceleration capabilities already built into millions of ATI Radeon graphics cards.