The data clearly indicates that NVIDIA had a driver problem, but it's impossible to quantify the scope of that problem given the numbers above. NVIDIA holds a greater percentage of the market than ATI, which means that there will inevitably be a higher percentage of NVIDIA driver crashes than ATI driver crashes; however, the degree to which such market share considerations have affected the results above is hard to determine in the absence of more data. There's also the matter of data collection; Microsoft's charts do not clarify if multiple crashes from a single system each counted as separate events. In theory, NVIDIA's proportion of total driver crashes could be inflated by a relatively small handful of systems with severe driver issues.

As we’ve mentioned, the Catalyst v8.3 driver suite will officially support three and four GPU CrossFireX configurations. You may have heard some scuttlebutt over the last few weeks stating that CrossFire works with some mismatched GPUs as well, which is actually the case. AMD's new Catalyst v8.3 drivers will let users match up Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards, with standard 3870s and even the 3850 - basically any RV670 / R680 combo will work. This is interesting because it adds some level of flexibility to end-users looking to take advantage of a multi-GPU setup. Three-way CrossFireX configuration can consist of three Radeon HD 3870 cards, or a single 3870 X2 and single 3870, for example, or any other combo of HD 3800 series cards. And four-way CrossFireX can be achieved with a pair of Radeon 3870 X2 cards, or four standard 3870s, etc. We should note, however, that three and four-GPU CrossFireX is only supported under Windows Vista and only with DirectX 9 and some DirectX 10 titles at this time. Full Support for DirectX 10 (with four GPU scaling) and OpenGL will come at a later time, although Call of Juarez happens to be one DX10 game that does scale currently with four GPUs. Also note, two card CrossFire is obviously still supported in XP; it's just the three and four GPU setups that are exclusive to Vista.

So there appears to be quite a lot of changes in this version of the Catalyst.

Highlights of the Catalyst 8.2 Windows release include:

Performance improvements
• Company of Heroes: DirectX 10 performance improves as much as 20% on the ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series and ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series of products. DirectX 10 performance improves as much as 30% on CrossFire configurations using the ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series or ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series of products

Resolved Issue highlights:
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars: Corruption is no longer noticed when editing levels.
• World of Warcraft: Flickering and missing objects are no longer noticed when playing the game in OpenGL mode.
• Doom3: Running an OpenGL application with CrossFire™ enabled and AA set to 16x no longer results in corruption being noticed when the display resolution is set to 2048x1536 or higher.
• TianXia2: Launching the game no longer results in the Windows XP operating system rebooting.
• .NET Framework an Unhandled Exception error no longer occurs when upon booting or re-booting the system.
• A white dot no longer appears on the windows desktop when launching the Catalyst Control Center. However, this issue may still be experienced under the Windows XP operating system.
• Audio stutter is no longer noticed when using the HDMI connector.
• The Catalyst Control Center options are no longer missing for the secondary extended display when hot unplugging and hot plugging the display device.
• Native CrossFire™ can now be enabled when the primary display device is connected to the master card using a CV or TV.

Highlights of the Linux Catalyst 8.2 release include:

Resolved Issues
• The Xserver no longer crashes if the screen resolution is changed in horizontal or vertical desktop setup with a monitor that does not support DDC.
• The Xserver no longer segfaults or fails to initialize DRI if a BusID was specified in an unexpected format in xorg.conf.
• The Xserver no longer freezes on shutdown if atieventsd is running.
• The first OpenGL application run after starting a session on Xserver version 1.4 no longer hangs.

For more information on Catalyst 8.2 (for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the Catalyst 8.2 release notes found in driver download section.

AMD has released the new Catalyst 7.10 "Shoot-em-up" drivers for Windows XP and Vista. They are available for download at the ATI Catalyst Page. Check out the Press Release for general information about the new drivers.

CrossFire support and performance are significantly improved in Catalyst 7.10. Real world tests have shown an improvement of 50% to 93% on some games while in CrossFire mode, when compared to the 7.9 version. For more information, read the Catalyst 7.10 Release Notes.