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%.
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New Features

What’s new in Catalyst 9.7:

ATI Catalyst™ 9.7 – AMD’s first official unified Windows7 / Windows Vista Microsoft WHQL certified graphics driver for the Windows 7 RTM

• AMD has delivered its first official unified WHQL certified graphics driver designed for the Windows 7 RTM (Release To Manufacturing)

• ATI Catalyst™ 9.7 delivers a superior Windows 7 experience:

• Great gaming performance – superior performance compared to Windows Vista for single GPU configurations (gains of up to 10%) and especially ATI CrossFireX™ configurations (gains of up to 40% for dual GPU configurations, and gains of up to 90% for QUAD GPU configurations)

• Stability – through AMD’s WHQL certified, unified Windows 7 / Windows Vista graphics driver

• Leadership in Innovation – support for all the Windows 7 WDDM 1.1 features and AMD ATI Catalyst features on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of products ATI Catalyst™ Control Center – Enhanced user interface

• The ATI Catalyst™ Control Center features a newly redesigned user interface to enhance usability and end user efficiency. Highlights include:

o A newly designed Desktops & Displays Manager - enabling users to more quickly configure and arrange their displays

o A new streamlined look – settings and controls are now found in the new “Graphics” and “Options” drop down menus, allowing users to very quickly select different Tabs to adjust the desired settings

o Full support for HydraVision under Windows 7

• The new ATI Catalyst Control Center is supported under Windows 7 and Windows Vista ATI Video encoder update – support for Windows 7

• ATI Catalyst 9.7 introduces support for the ATI Video converter under Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 7 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

This month we are seeing a further performance increase with Company of Heroes and some significant performance increases for Crysis Warhead, Crysis and World in Conflict, compared with last month’s ATI Cataylst 9.5 driver. Following are some of this month’s highlights. Detailed release notes are available here.

* Company of Heroes – performance gains of up to 25% for the ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series, and performance gains of up to 10% for the ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series
* Crysis Warhead – performance gains of up to 11% for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual configuration.
* Crysis – performance gains of up to 13% for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual configuration.
* World in Conflict – performance gains of up to 30% for high settings that were previously CPU limited with the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series.
Of course, your performance may vary, depending on your particular system configuration.

The runtime should enable quicker transcoding with lower CPU loads as the company’s technical manager explained that AMD “unlocked” the video processor in order to enable non-real-time decoding. He also added how resolution scaling on the GPU saves a lot of memory bandwidth but he did say that the CPU still handles tasks such as entropy estimation.

The hotfix is located here.