As for the general tendencies, the programmers from AMD graphics division who are responsible for Catalyst drivers and Catalyst Control Center development are evidently focusing their main efforts on improving the performance of the CrossFireX technology, although single-GPU solutions also get some. Moreover, they keep fixing a lot of small and not very small issues in the new Catalyst and CCC versions, and even though these issues are not fatal, they are in fact pretty annoying. All of the fixes are described in detail in the driver release notes and it is certainly a great thing.

Marketing sound bite: ATI CatalystTM 9.3 driver - the industries first Unified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista I like it when it’s easy and for you gamers that means you now have a single ATI Catalyst driver for both Microsoft Vista and Windows 7. This driver allows you to swap back and forth between OSs with the same driver set; it makes for an easy, clean Windows 7 experience - without the hassle of multiple drivers, versions, etc. Another exciting part about a unified driver is that moving forward our ATI software gurus plan to continue to deliver a single unified driver for Windows Vista and Windows 7. Great news for all! Also, ATI Catalyst delivers full WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) 1.1 support under Windows 7 for all ATI RadeonTM HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 series of graphics cards. So, in benefit speak, this new WDDM 1.1 support utilizes DirectX 10 rather than DirectX 9 and can cut down your GPU memory usage by half when opening up multiple windows thereby enabling increased performance. Marketing sound bite: ATI Catalyst 9.3 Folding@Home performance enhancements * Here is a very noble cause improvement, Folding@Home. You’ll experience outstanding Folding@Home scores when running ATI Catalyst 9.3 and the most recent F@H client. We utilize ATI Stream technology which means you must have an ATI RadeonTM HD 4000, HD 3000 or HD 2000 series GPU to take full advantage of these enhancements.

Nvidia was happy to report that it wins in the top five games, and in two other games it scores better, as ATI would not even run these games. According to the source Nvidia wins in Call of Duty World at War by a few frames, Call of Duty 4 by more than ten percent. It is slightly faster in Left 4 dead and almost two times faster in Mirror’s Edge. You can probably blame lack of PhysX for ATI, for such a performance lead in this game.