ATI Catalyst 9.5 Driver – Everything you want to know
May 19, 2009 by Cabro · Leave a Comment
Do you regularly update your graphics drivers?
With 2 months of ATI CatalystTM driver blogs under our belt, we are seeing a steady engagement from you guys in the community via this blog site. Please keep up the comments and suggestions and we will endeavor to answer as many as we can. So, without further ado – let me introduce ATI Catalyst 9.5!
Please report all driver related issues here.
*If you are having technical issues with your graphics card or are in need of driver support, please use the proper channels to submit those issues here.*
Marketing sound bite: ATI CatalystTM 9.5 – Unified Microsoft WHQL certified graphics driver for Windows® 7 and Windows Vista®
WHQL is the word of the month for this blog; AMD was the first to introduce a fully certified single unified WHQL approved graphics driver for Windows® 7 and Windows Vista®. By meeting Microsoft’s WHQL certification requirements in ATI CatalystTM 9.5 driver for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, we clearly showcase our continued focus on delivering an extremely stable and robust Win 7 experience. First to market is important, but best to market first is how we roll at AMD in terms of graphics driver support for new operating systems. AMD led the market with early support for Vista and now continues that graphics driver leadership with the launch of Catalyst 9.5.
All ATI RadeonTM GPU users with an ATI Radeon HD 4000, 3000 and 2000 series product will enjoy WHQL certified support under Win 7 with ATI Catalyst 9.5.
Marketing sound bite: ATI Stream update:
<Insert Drum roll here please>
The comments section of my blog has been filled for 2 months with questions on when we were going to deliver 64-bit support for ATI AVIVOTM technology under Windows Vista, today is the day!
With today’s release of ATI Catalyst 9.5 a number of issues that you may have previously experienced using the ATI Video Converter have been resolved! Also, ATI AVIVO technology is now supported under Windows Vista 32-bit and Windows Vista 64-bit.
Using ATI Stream technology, users of ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series and ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can take advantage of new optimizations in this video conversion tool (found in ATI CatalystTM Control Center Basic View) for a better experience when transcoding video files.
Game Optimizations: ATI CatalystTM 9.5
One of the items I want to cover each month is optimizations in games and highlighting those for you in this blog; now, I want to be honest and upfront, I intend to highlight the top games and/or optimizations but not all of them! All of the details and minutia are listed in the release notes of each ATI Catalyst Driver and that can be viewed here.
For this month the highlights are:
- Unigine Tropics DirectX® 9 – enables performance gains for single GPU and ATI CrossFireXTM configurations with anti-aliasing enabled.
- Company of Heroes - enables performance gains for both single GPU and ATI CrossFireXTM configurations.
- BattleForge- enables performance gains for ATI CrossFireXTM configurations.
And last but surely not least, my favorite community: Linux® ATI CatalystTM 9.5
No new features this month but a host of fixes included in this month’s release.
Source: AMD Blog
Sphere: Related ContentATI Catalyst 9.3 Driver: Performance Express-Test
March 20, 2009 by Cabro · Leave a Comment
ATI Catalyst drivers development follows a very precise schedule. The number after the point in the driver index stands for the release month. Since February is over and March has already passed its middle, the time has come for the new ATI Catalyst driver version 9.3 to be released. So, what do the ATI Catalyst driver developers can tell us about the new version?
According to the release notes, Catalyst 9.3 doesn’t promise any performance breakthroughs in any of the contemporary games, except Lost Planet: Colonies shooter, where we should see up to 20% performance improvement for Radeon HD 4800 cards and up to 50% improvement for less powerful solutions, such as Radeon HD 4600, 4500 and 4300. They also mentioned that performance may increase in a few other cases when it is limited by the CPU. They also haven’t forgotten about Folding@Home distributed computing project fans: the performance in GPGPU mode is also supposed to be increased.
Catalyst 9.3 Released!
March 18, 2009 by Cabro · Leave a Comment
New Features
This section provides information on new features found in this release of the Radeon™
Display Driver. These include the following:
- ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 Unified driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista
- ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 Folding@Home performance enhancements
- ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 – Windows Vista HDMI audio driver support integrated into all ATI Catalyst 9.3 packages
- New AMD Display Library (ADL) SDK
ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 Unified driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista
- AMD has delivered a single unified graphics driver for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista – demonstrating AMD’s Windows 7 graphics driver leadership and focus on delivering a stable and robust Windows 7 experience on AMD hardware
- Delivers full WDDM 1.1 support under Windows 7 on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of products
- Delivers improved gaming performance under Windows 7 vs. Windows Vista
- All future ATI Catalyst postings will deliver one single unified driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista
ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 Folding@Home performance enhancements
- 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 and upcoming cores in conjunction with ATI Catalyst™ 9.3
ATI Catalyst™ 9.3 – Windows Vista HDMI audio driver support integrated into all ATI Catalyst 9.3 packages
- As of ATI Catalyst 9.3 the Windows Vista HDMI audio driver is automatically included in the ATI Catalyst 9.3 package
- The HDMI audio driver will only be installed if the AMD graphics accelerator has an HDMI display connector and there is no 3rd party HDMI audio driver installed
New AMD Display Library (ADL) SDK
- AMD Display Library (ADL) SDK is designed to access display driver functionality for all ATI Radeon graphics accelerators and FirePro graphics accelerators
- The SDK supports Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux – 32 and 64 bit variants
- The SDK can be used from both unmanaged (C/C++) and managed (C#) applications – samples are provided within the SDK
- The ADL SDK is available to the public via the Developer relations site
Performance Improvements
Catalyst™ 9.3 brings performance benefits in several cases where framerates are CPUlimited.
Some measured examples are:
- Lost Planet: Colonies gains up to 20% on 4800 series products, and up to 50% on 4600, 4500 and 4300 series 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:
- Video combing effects no longer visible during movie playback while fast forwarding or rewinding
- Avivo Video Color Settings are now retained after resume from Sleep/Hibernate
- Overlay Theater Mode is now enabled with component video or composite video in extended modes
- Catalyst Control Center: Avivo Video Advanced Color page is no longer grayed out and preview is now functional
- OGL games now play properly with “Show Crossfire logo…” option enabled
- Rotation now works if Aero mode is turned off
Resolved Issues for the Windows XP Operating System
This section provides information on resolved issues in this release of the ATI Catalyst™
Software Suite for Windows XP. These include:
- Avivo Video Color Settings will now be applied in the video when played using PowerDVD
Download Here: ATI Catalyst version 9.3 for Windows XP/Vista/7 (32/64-bit versions)
Sphere: Related ContentATI Catalyst 8.6 Analysis – XP & Vista
June 22, 2008 by Cabro · Leave a Comment
We’ve been so busy with the new HD 4800 series of cards that I honestly thought I would never get the time to really look at what’s going on with the latest Catalyst release.
With some good performance promises this time around, we’ll have to see how the new driver set goes on our mighty test bed.
3DMark Vantage:10 to 15% gains across all Radeon™ HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, with larger gains in specific cases.
Call of Duty 4: Performance increases across all Radeon™ HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, with gains as large as 35% in specific maps.
Call of Juarez DX10: Performance increases between 2 and 9% across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products
Company of Heroes (DX10 version): Performance increases between 4 and 10% across HD 36xx and HD 34xx products.
Lost Planet (DX10 version): Performance increases by 1 or 2 fps across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, creating in some cases up to 20% increase.
Lost Planet (DX9 version): Performance increases between 2 and 20% across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products
Prey OpenGL: 3-5% gains across HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products.
Quake 4 OpenGL: Up to 8% increase across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products.
Shadermark 2.1: Minor improvements across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, with the largest gains appearing on HD 3650 (up to 9%)
ViewPerf 10: Substantial performance improvements across several of the sub-tests, with the largest gains in ugnx (up to 55%), catia (up to 17%) and tcvis (up to 10%) across all of the HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products.
Let’s see if we get any gains in our test system here today.
