Highlights of the ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 Windows release include:

Performance improvements

* Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance improves up to 15-50% in CPU limited settings with the largest gains in CrossfireX configurations.
* Company of Heroes DirectX 10 performance improves by up to 10-77% in CPU limited settings.
* Crysis DirectX 10 Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 10% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 34% in CPU limited settings.
* Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 7% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 69% in CPU limited settings.
* Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 Dual CrossfireX performance improves as much as 50% and Quad CrossfireX performance improves as much as 88% in CPU limited settings.
* Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 Dual CrossfireX performance improves up to 40% in CPU limited settings with Quad CrossfireX performance improving up to 60%.
* UnigineTropics OpenGL performance improves 5-20%
* UnigineTropics DirectX 10 Quad CrossfireX performance improves 5-20% in CPU limited settings.
* World in Conflict DirectX 10 performance improves by 5-10%.
*

New Features OpenGL™ 3.1 extension support
· This release of ATI Catalyst™ provides OpenGL™ 3.1 extension support. The following is a list of OpenGL™ 3.1 features and extensions added in Catalyst 9.8:
o Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.30 and 1.40.
o Instanced rendering with a per-instance counter accessible to vertex shaders (GL ARB draw instanced).
o Data copying between buffer objects (GL EXT copy buffer).
o Primitive restart (NV primitive restart). Because client enable/disable no longer exists in OpenGL 3.1, the PRIMITIVE RESTART state has become server state, unlike the NV extension where it is client state. As a result, the numeric values assigned to PRIMITIVE RESTART and PRIMITIVE RESTART INDEX differ from the NV versions of those tokens.
o At least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders, in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders.
o Texture buffer objects (GL ARB texture buffer object).
o Rectangular textures (GL ARB texture rectangle).
o Uniform buffer objects (GL ARB uniform buffer object).
o SNORM texture component formats.
Highlights of the Linux ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 release include:

New Features

Support for new Linux operating systems

* This release of ATI Catalyst™ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:
* RHEL 4.8 production support
* Ubuntu 9.04 production support
ATI Catalyst™ Control Center Linux Edition support for RandR 1.2

* This release of ATI Catalyst™ Linux introduces ATI Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition support for the RandR 1.2 extension API. The following new feature are now available in the ATI Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition Display Manager:
o Display rotation
o Multiple display arrangement and desktop sizing

For more information on ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 (for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, please see the ATI Catalyst™ 9.8 release notes.