ATI Driver Release Thread

[GamersCrib]

This thread for all updated Video Drivers from ATI - beta or official!


Released 8-20-08

Catalyst 8.8 Official

This release of Catalyst™ introduces new Avivo video features:

* Dynamic Gamma/Contrast correction, available on the ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series, improves video image quality by delivering more vivid color in content with sharp contrasts and scenes with low and bright images.
* Improved video presets, available for the ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 and ATI Radeon™ 4800 Series, delivers a newly optimized video presets that users can select depending on what kind of video content they are viewing.
* Windows XP support: Edge enhancement, which adjusts the level of sharpness of video content and Noise Reduction, which removes ghosting artifacts while preserving details of the original video. The new slider controls can be found in the All Settings page of the Avivo Video tab found in the Catalyst™ Control Center

Hybrid Graphics Support for Windows XP

This release of Catalyst™ introduces Hybrid Graphics support. Hybrid Graphics delivers a significant 3D performance boost for systems featuring an AMD 780G/780D integrated graphics motherboard and an ATI Radeon™ HD 3400 Series or ATI Radeon™ HD 2400 Series graphics accelerator. It also provides support for up to four independent displays

DOWNLOAD Catalyst 8.8 Here! (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/8-8_xp32_dd_67975.exe)

You can review release notes for this set here (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/Catalyst_88_release_notes.html).

[GamersCrib]

Released 9-17-2008

Catalyst 8.9 WHQL Release:

The all new Radeon Catalyst update for September. Obviously including the new X2, Radeon HD 4600 support and a lot of new features and updates.

New Features

Catalyst Control Center: New Display mode support

* This release of Catalyst™ introduces 1080p @ 50Hz custom mode support for HDTVs for the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series, and ATI Radeon X1000 Series of products. Users can configure their own custom 1080p @ 50Hz modes to best fit their display.

Overdrive support for QUAD CrossFireX configurations

* This release of Catalyst™ introduces Overdrive support for QUAD CrossFireX configurations. Users can now over-clock each graphics accelerator’s engine or memory speed when running in QUAD CrossFire configurations using manual controls or the automated auto-tuning utility.

OpenGL™ 3.0 support – Phase 1

* This release of Catalyst™ introduces OpenGL™ 3.0 extension support. Future Catalyst™ releases will continue to expand support for OpenGL 3.0 extensions. The following is a list of supported extensions in Catalyst 8.9:

o ARB_half_float_pixel
o ARB_draw_instanced
o ARB_instanced_arrays
o EXT_texture_compression_3dc
o EXT_texture_compression_rgtc
o EXT_texture_compression_latc
o EXT_texture_shared_exponent
o EXT_depth_buffer_float
o EXT_gpu_shader4
o ARB_map_buffer_range

Resolved Issue highlights

* Company of Heroes: Setting the in-game options to maximum levels no longer results in the game exiting to the desktop after the game has completed loading.
* DiRT: Setting shadows to ultra quadCF no longer results in a performance drop being noticed.
* Assassins Creed: Brightness and saturation distortion is no longer observed during game play with ForceAA enabled.
* Grid: Enabling CrossFire and starting a new game no longer results in flickering bands being noticed across the display device.
* Jericho: Corruption is no longer noticed when AA is enabled and the in-game option Advanced Smoothing is enabled.
* Age of Conan: Playing the game for a short period of time no longer results in flickering corruption being noticed.


Download 32bit XP Catalyst 8.9 Here (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/8-9_xp32_dd_68898.exe)

Download 32bit Vista Catalyst 8.9 Here (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/8-9_vista32_dd_68905.exe)

Download 64bit Vista Catalyst 8.9 Here (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/8-9_vista64_dd_68906.exe)

[GamersCrib]

ATI Catalyst 8.10 WHQL Released
Oct 15th 2008

Highlights of the Catalyst 8.10 Windows release include:

Performance improvements

* Unreal Tournament 3: Performance increases of up to 15% are seen when using the ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series or ATI Radeon™ HD 3800 Series of products
* Prey: Performance increases between 2% to 5% are seen on ATI CrossFire™ configured systems when using the ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series, and ATI Radeon ™ HD 3800 Series of products

New Features

Catalyst Control Center enhancements:


* This release of Catalyst introduces fan control (within the ATI Catalyst Control Center Overdrive tab) for the ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series of products, giving users greater control and flexibility when over-clocking their graphics accelerator
* This release of Catalyst introduces the Force Component Video detection option (within the ATI Catalyst Control Center Display Options tab) which enables to users to force certain Component Video modes to be shown in the Catalyst Control Center Displays Manager. This feature is designed for user having trouble properly setting up their Component Video display.



Catalyst 8.10 XP32bit (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/8-10_xp32_dd_69561.exe).

Catalyst 8.10 XP64bit (http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp64/radeonx-xp64)

Catalyst 8.10 Vista32bit (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/8-10_vista32_dd_69564.exe)

Catalyst 8.10 Vista64bit (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/8-10_vista64_dd_69565.exe)

[GamersCrib]

ATI Catalyst 8.11 WHQL Released
Nov 13th 2008

ATI CrossFireX™ Enhancements
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. (The “ATI Cross-FireX” logo will be shown on screen when the application is running).

HydraVision Support for Windows XP
This release of ATI Catalyst™ introduces HydraVision support for the ATI Catalyst ™ Control Center under Windows XP. HydraVision enables users to more efficiently organize multiple applications across single or multiple displays. Highlights include:

* HydraGrid – A new feature found in HydraVision that divides the Windows desktop into user definable areas. This helps users to more easily move and organize multiple applications.
* HydraVision Hotkeys – The ATI Catalyst™ Control Center Hotkey Manager can assist users to quickly setup and define their HydraVision specific hotkey commands.
* HydraVision Virtual Desktops – Users can configure up to 9 different virtual desktops. This enables users to manage and group multiple applications across each user defined desktop. Application positions, desktop associations and display settings can be saved for every virtual desktop.
* HydraVision Wizard – Using the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center Wizard, users can configure their HyrdaVision settings with ease.


New Display Enhancements
This release of ATI Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for display scaling to resize the display devices that support TV timings (480i/p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p) through either digital (DVI or HDMI) or analog (component) interfaces. Performance Improvements

The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst

FarCry 2 – performance gains of 3 to 10% for Single card mode and 8 to 14% in Crossfire mode, with some specific configurations showing even greater improvements. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and Radeon HD3xxx products.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky – performance gains of 6 to 18% in single card settings and 10 to 30% in CrossfireX mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD04xx and Radeon HD3xxx products.
Resolved Issues for the Windows Vista Operating
System

This section provides information on resolved issues in this release of the ATI Catalyst™ Software Suite for Windows Vista. These include:

* During game play for “Age of Conan”, DirectX 10 may cause the screen to blank Resizing video during playback may intermittently cause desktop video corruption
* Video playback tearing may occur under Windows Vista 32 or XP
* Hardware acceleration is not enabled when playing HD content using Cyberlink
* Catalyst Control Center, Overdrive options missing under Graphics settings
* Some OpenGL content may not align to the Hydravision preset grid
* Catalyst Control Center 'ShowGrid' does not display the correct grid settings for the attached displays
* “Gratitude{EF25BC.....}” or HydraGrid.exe executables will be shown under process tab after launching Hydragrid



Catalyst 8.11 XP32bit (http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp)

Catalyst 8.11 XP64bit (http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp64/radeonx-xp64)

Catalyst 8.11 Vista32bit (http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=vista32/common-vista32)

Catalyst 8.11 Vista64bit (http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=vista64/common-vista64)

[GamersCrib]

ATI Catalyst 8.12 WHQL Released
December 10th 2008


Download all versions of the 8.12 Catalyst Drivers Here! (http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx)

AMD released ATI Catalyst 8.12 drivers. ATI Catalyst 8.12 Windows driver release include:

ATI Stream support:

With the release of ATI Catalyst 8.12 users can unlock the potential of accelerated applications enabling ATI Stream technology for millions of ATI Radeon™ graphics processors worldwide
ATI Stream harnesses the tremendous processing power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for high-performance, data-intensive computations over a wide range of scientific, business and consumer applications.
ATI Stream enables the hundreds of parallel cores inside AMD graphics processors to accelerate general purpose applications. These capabilities will allow ATI Stream-enabled programs, for a variety of different tasks and from a growing number of software vendors, to operate with optimized performance or with new functionality.
The CAL (Compute Abstraction Layer) is now include in the Catalyst driver package. CAL is the enabling component for ATI Stream


ATI Stream application: ATI Avivo Video Converter

Using ATI Stream technology, owners of ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can take advantage of this video conversion tool (found in Catalyst Control Center Basic View) to achieve incredible performance levels in video transcoding.
ATI Catalyst Control Center – Noise reduction for progressive video content:

This release of Catalyst™ introduces a new advanced video quality control: Noise Reduction for progressive video content, which removes ghosting artifacts while preserving details of the original video. The slider control can be found in the All Settings page of the Avivo Video tab found in the Catalyst Control Center.

Performance improvements:

Catalyst 8.12 Preliminary Performance Notes
Crysis + 2-7%
Crysis Warhead + 2-3%
Devil May Cry 4 + 1-6%
Far Cry 2
+ noAA scores are fixed for Crossfire configs; this is worth +20% on slower cards, and as much as 70% on faster ones
+ 5-10% gains when AA is enabled
FEAR + 2-6%
Left 4 Dead + 2-4%
Lost Planet Colonies + 3-10%, mostly in Area 2
Prey + 2-5%
STALKER Clear Sky + 5-10%, primarily on Crossfire configurations

[GamersCrib]

ATI Catalyst 9.1 WHQL Released
January 29th 2009


Download all versions of the 9.1 Catalyst Drivers Here! (http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html)

If you wish to view the release notes you can go here (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/Catalyst_91_release_notes.pdf).

[GamersCrib]

ATI Catalyst 9.2 WHQL Released
February 20th 2009


Download all versions of the 9.2 Catalyst Drivers Here! (http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html)


Catalyst™ 9.2 brings performance benefits in several cases where framerates are CPU-limited. Some measured examples are:

* 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.


List of fixes from the Release notes below:

Resolved Issues for the Windows Vista Operating System

* Catalyst Control Center now enables Anisotropic Filtering for DirectX 10 applications.
* Resolved Catalyst Control Center displaying the following warning message “The Catalyst Control Center is not supported by the driver version.”
* Catalyst Control Center, Display Manager correctly shows connected monitor maximum refresh rates
* Catalysts Control Center, component video pixel format settings are retained on system restart
* Minor screen corruption no longer occurs at the top left of some Samsung panels when connected to ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
* In Call of Duty 4, some intermittent game corruption no longer occurs when soften smoke edges is enabled
* Resinstalling the display driver using the INF method on a multi-display (ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2, Radeon HD 3870) system does not cause the operating system to fail
* Resolved minor flickering in the playback of a Blu-ray title that may be noticed when moving to the extended desktop
* Catalyst Control Center, Crossfire Overdrive, changing the GPU Clock and Memory Clock from the default settings no longer causes a failure in the Test Custom Clocks test
* With Anti-Alias enabled Doom3 no longer intermittently fails to start on some Crossfire systems
* Enemy Territory: Quake Wars corruption observed in the globe in the main menu no longer occurs
* The display driver no longer fails to load on some systems with more than 8 GB of system RAM
* Catalyst Control Center, some HDMI monitor are not longer incorrectly reported back as DVI
* Resolved video displaying in black and white when playing back high bitrate AVCHD files
* Playing back some Blu-ray content with video acceleration disabled on Cyberlink Power DVD_Cinema no longer results in no video rendering
* Fixed H.264 videos not rendering (black video) when Closed Captioning was enabled
* Overlay Theater Mode now enables with a component video or composite video in extended modes
* Playing some Blu-ray DVD titles on PowerDVD no longer shows the lower portion of the player window intermittently appear shaky when playing Special Features
* Some video shake is no longer observed when fast forwarding with certain Blue-ray titles
* Resolved intermittent system instability with catalyst 8.12 and some ATI Radeon HD 4800 CrossFire configurations
* Video tearing no longer noticed when playing back some DVD titles on WinDVD with all hardware acceleration options enabled
* Creating any type of an OpenGL 3.0 context (normal or forward compatible) and then requesting the version string no longer causes the driver to stop responding
* The OS is no longer unstable while running auto-tune when Crossfire is enabled

Resolved Issues for the Windows XP Operating System

* System instabilities no longer happens after mode switching in extended mode while playing some copy protected DVDs
* Catalyst Control Center, CrossFire option can no longer be toggled on/off during playback of video on a CrossFire enabled system
* Creating any type of an OpenGL 3.0 context (normal or forward compatible) and then requesting the version string no longer causes the driver to stop responding
* With Overlay Theater Mode and stretched desktop enabled, dragging media player to extended desktop no longer shows corruption or causes system instability
* High CPU usage and choppy playback issues have been resolved during Blu-ray playback on WinDVD 9
* Catalysts Control Center, component video pixel format settings are now retained on system restart

Known Issues Under the Windows Vista Operating System

* AVIVO converter may fail to convert h.264 avi video to another format
* “Unsupported file formats” error message dialog may occur when selecting H.264,.mp4 and VC1 file formats
* “CCC Host application...” error message dialog may occur when cancelling a transcoding process
* Output media file size differs after transcoding multiple times to the same format
* Catalyst Control Center, advanced color page is grayed out and preview is blank on some Radeon ASICS
* Drop frames may be noticed when playing interlaced DVD content
* The ATI AVIVO video transcoder does not currently use GPU acceleration under Windows Vista 64-bit edition
* Catalyst Control Center: error message dialog 'CCC Host Application' may be displayed when cancelling a transcoding process

Known Issues Under the Windows XP Operating System

* Transcoding a VOB DVD file (18min source file) results in 2.27min output file
* Transcoding falls back to CPU after transcoding to DVD/ MPEG2 multiple times in XP
* Media files transcoded using CPU instead of GPU in XP MCE OS
* AVIVO Video color settings may fail to be applied in the video when played using PowerDVD
* Mode switching while playing videos with WinDVD7 may cause the video color to become darker

If you wish to view the release notes you can go here (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/gamesite/Catalyst_92_release_notes.pdf).

[GamersCrib]

ATI Catalyst 9.4 WHQL ReleasedApril 9th 2009

NOTE: Only Radeon HD2xxx, HD3xxx, and HD4xxx series desktop graphics cards are supported.

New Features:

* ATI Catalyst™ 9.4 - New ATI OverDrive™ auto-tuning application
* ATI Catalyst 9.4 includes a new ATI Overdrive™ auto-tune application to accurately determine the best over-clocked engine and memory values for ATI Overdrive supported ATI Radeon™ Graphics accelerators.
* Designed for the ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 Series



Resolved Issues for the Windows Vista Operating System

* "World of Warcraft" or "World of Warcraft - Wrath of the Lich King": Flickering no longer occurs when Shadow is set to medium/high using CrossFire
* Google Sketchup no longer displays blank screen
* Resolutions above 10 x 7 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

Resolved Issues for the Windows XP Operating System

* The Compute Abstraction Layer (CAL) driver now functions properly under
Windows XP
* Overlay Theatre Mode display no longer corrupt after enabling 3D screen saver
* OS Display Settings no longer shows extra resolutions for Component Video

Resolved Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System

* City of Villains: Display now redraws correctly after changing graphics settings
* Catalyst Control Center: 1080i@30hz and 1080i@25hz Component Video modes
can now be applied via Component Video - Advanced aspect
ATI Catalyst™ Release Note Version 9.4 5
* Custom formats modes can now be applied properly and will be available under "List
All Modes"
* Display profiles will now be restored when displays are swapped while the system
sleeps
* WinDVD9 HD playback doesn't cause the desktop to jitter or flicker anymore
* Device Manager no longer displays error during express driver uninstall


Download the latest ATI Catalyst 9.4 Drivers Here! (http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx)

[GamersCrib]

ATI Catalyst 9.5 driver released

ATI just released Catalyst 9.5 for Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. The driver is 100% the same as we have been serving since the weekend. So if you tried that version already, there's no reason or need to reinstall the driver.

Release note:

Performance improvements

* Unigine Tropics DX9 – performance gains of up to 11% for single GPU and ATI CrossFireX™ configurations with anti-aliasing enabled.
* Company of Heroes – performance gains of up to 10% for both single GPU and ATI CrossFireX™ configurations.
* BattleForge– performance gains of up to 10% for ATI CrossFireX™ configurations.

New Features

ATI Catalyst™ 9.5 – Unified Microsoft WHQL certified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista

* AMD has delivered a single unified graphics driver that has received WHQL certification for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista

o Meeting Microsoft’s WHQL certification requirements in the ATI Catalyst 9.5 driver for Windows 7 clearly demonstrates AMD’s focus and determination to deliver an extremely stable and robust Windows 7 experience on AMD’s ATI Radeon Graphics accelerators

* Delivers full WDDM 1.1 WHQL certified support under Windows 7 on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of products

ATI Stream™:

* ATI Video encoder update
* ATI Catalyst 9.5 resolves a number of issues previously seen in the ATI Video Converter and is supported under Windows Vista 32-bit and Windows Vista 64-bit
* Using ATI Stream technology, owners of ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series and ATI Radeon™ HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can take advantage of this video conversion tool
(found in ATI Catalyst™ Control Center Basic View) to achieve substantial performance improvements when transcoding video files

Download XP,Vista and Win7 ATI's Driver Here!! (http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx)

[GamersCrib]

ATI Catalyst Official 9.8 Drivers Released
Sept 15th, 2009


Though these drivers are not yet available on the official download page, Over at Quakecon Ian “Cabrtosr” McNaughton released Catalyst 9.8 drivers.
According to the latest info, with this driver, you should see significant performance increases on AMD platforms.
These improvements are more platform related – you will see gains of up to 50% in some titles (like Far Cry 2) when using a CrossFire solution with 4870 X2 or other 4xxx series in resolutions 16x10 and higher – you’ll see these gains mostly in CPU-bound situations. You will also see significant improvements in titles like HAWX, Crysis, Company of Heroes and World in Conflict.


Download links below:

XP 32bit Catalyst 9.8 (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/9-8_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu.exe)

XP 64bit Catalyst 9.8 (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/9-8_xp64_dd_ccc_enu.exe)

Vista/Win7 32bit Catalyst 9.8
(https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/9-8_vista32_win7_32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu.exe)
Vista/Win7 64bit Catalyst 9.8 (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/9-8_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu.exe)