Drivers are one of the most if not the most important component in a computer. Without stable, functioning drivers for your operating system of choice your hardware is about as good as an expensive paper weight. Video card drivers are ones that almost always need constant updates with new games, fixing bugs, enhancing performance and new features. Once a month, every month now for the past few years ATI have rolled out a new driver update for their Catalyst drivers with new fixes, features, and also some claims of performance updates. Today we're going to look at the latest Catalyst drivers from ATI in version 8.5.

We won't go into all of the fixes and updates in the new drivers for that you can read the very lengthy release notes here. Here's a quick rundown of a few highlights of new features though.

Catalyst™ Control Center Component Video
This release of Catalyst™ introduces 480i and 480p support. These formats will
be found in the pre-defined component video format list found in the Catalyst™
Control Center->Component Video->Advanced page.

ATI Graphics Driver Un-install Enhancement
This release of Catalyst™ introduces an update to the ATI un-install utility. The
utility now pop up dialogue box to show two options to the end user,
• Remove ATI Radeon™ graphics software, leave chipset software (RECOMMENDED).
• Completely remove all ATI/AMD (Graphics/Chipset) software.

SECAM TV Out Support
This release of Catalyst™ introduces support within the graphics driver to enable
TV output adhering to the SECAM standard.

1080p HDTV custom mode
This release of Catalyst™ 1080p HDTV display mode. This feature will be available
for display devices that use an HDMI connector and is available under the
Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

HDMI Audio for non-standard TV modes
This release of Catalyst™ introduces HDMI audio support for all TV timing
modes and non-standard (CEA 861b) TV modes. If a non-standard mode is used,
on initial connection to the TV, a pop-up notification should let the user know that
the audio may be out of sync. A UI allows for the audio to be disabled by the user
if desired. The UI in Catalyst™ Control Center would show the list of TV timing
modes (both standard and non-standard) and the capability to enable audio for a
given mode.

Adaptive AA on OpenGL for Catalyst™ Control Center
This release of Catalyst™ introduces Adaptive AA for Orca Driver, geometry for
alpha tested objects are now submitted multiple times to the hardware using the
multi-sample mask feature to update one sample at a time in the frame buffer
using centroid sampling. With each pass of the sampling position for textures is
shifted to be at the location of the sample that is being updated in that pass.

1080p24 Mode Support
This release of Catalyst™ introduces 1080p24 mode support This feature will be
available for display devices that use an HDMI connector and is available under
the Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 support
This release of Catalyst™ introduces WHQL certified support for Microsoft’s
Windows XP Service Pack 3 update for all ATI Radeon™ Series products.

 We'll be taking a look though at performance improvements in the new drivers and testing for them. Here are the claims from ATI.

• Call of Juarez DX10: Performance increases up to 12% on systems containing
an ATI Radeon™ HD 3xx0 series of product
• Halo: Performance increases by 10-30% across all of the supported ATI
Radeon™ series of products
• Lost Planet DX10: Performance increases from 5 to 35% on systems containing
an ATI Radeon™ HD 3xx0 series of product
• Stalker DX9: Performance increases by 20-50% when HDR is enabled in the
game; across all ATI Radeon™ HD38x0 series of products
• World in Conflict DX10: Performance increases up to 25% on systems containing
an ATI Radeon™ HD36x0 and/or an ATI Radeon™ 38x0 series of
product. Higher performance gains are noticed on systems containing an ATI
Radeon™ 3870x2 series of product

We'll put this to the test with two different ATI video cards.