AMD have released Catalyst 11.9 drivers today. This is after releasing a beta of 11.10 for Battlefield 3.

AMD have released a preview version of the Catalyst 11.10 drivers for Battlefield 3 with specific performance improvements.

AMD has released Catalyst 11.8 drivers. Here are some details.

AMD Overdrive has been enhanced to include both CPU and GPU over-clocking controls within the AMD Vision Control Center
CPU over-clocking is only supported on AMD Black edition CPUs

Performance highlights

Improves performance up to 10% in Crysis 2 DirectX 11 version for both non-Anti-Aliasing, and application enabled Anti-Aliasing cases on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 and AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series
Improves performance up to 8% in Fear 3 DirectX 11 version with application enabled Anti-Aliasing on the
AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 and AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series
Improves performance up to 30% when AMD’s Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) is enabled through the
Catalyst™ Control Center on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 and AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series
Improves performance up to 20% in Call of Duty Black Operations for single GPU and Multi-GPU configurations on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 and AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series​​

AMD blogs about AMD releasing Catalyst Beta drivers for OpenGL 4.2.

Increased support for advanced techniques like single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency with the ability to enable shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. This can make it easier for developers to efficiently manage which objects are visible without requiring multiple rendering passes

The ability to save cycles by capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result – this means that complex objects can be efficiently replicated and repositioned

A new feature to allow modification of an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to download the texture to the GPU again, which can enable significant performance improvements

A full set of shader language features, including support for packing 8- and 16-bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth.

You can download them here for Windows and here for Linux.

The Khronos Group reported yesterday that the specification for the latest version of OpenGL is ready for consumption. This release adds many new features and achieves a greater parity with the latest DirectX version which currently is DX11.

Some of the new features in this release include:

 

• enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture.  These capabilities can be combined, for example, to maintain a counter at each pixel in a buffer object for single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency;
• capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated;
• modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements;
• packing multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced  memory storage and bandwidth, especially useful when transferring data between shader stages.

Both AMD and nVidia have promised to release beta drivers with this release so the companies should have WHQL(Windows Hardware Quality Labs) drivers by the end of the month.

“OpenGL 4.2 has integrated feedback from developers that are shipping significant OpenGL-based applications and games, making for a faster, more capable API which will continue to evolve to meet market needs,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, working group chair of the OpenGL ARB and director of Tegra graphics at NVIDIA. “As with previous OpenGL releases NVIDIA is committed to ship productized implementations as rapidly as possible after specification release. In fact, NVIDIA released production OpenGL 4.2 drivers today, enabling developers to immediately leverage this new functionality on NVIDIA GPUs.

“AMD plans to release our OpenGL 4.2 beta drivers with the publication of the OpenGL 4.2 specification,” said Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president, AMD Software Development (NYSE: AMD). “AMD strongly supports industry standards and congratulates the Khronos Group on their success in the rapid evolution of OpenGL and its other open standards that enable brilliant computing experiences.”

There is no word on when Intel will go beyond their current OGL 3.2 implementation.

Head over to the Khronos Group Web for more info and downloads. And you can also tune into the SIGGRAPH presentations here.