ATI Catalyst 9.5 drivers officially released

The Catalyst 9.5 drivers were already leaked a couple of days ago, but now you can grab them directly from AMD's website. It's available for Windows XP, Vista and 7.

ATI points out in the changelog that Catalyst 9.5 is a unified graphics driver that has received WHQL certification for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista. It delivers full WDDM 1.1 WHQL certified support under Windows 7 on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of products.

The driver promises some performance gains:

Unigine Tropics DX9 – performance gains of up to 11% for single GPU and ATI CrossFireX™ configurations with anti-aliasing enabled

Company of Heroes – performance gains of up to 10% for both single GPU and ATI CrossFireX™ configurations

BattleForge – performance gains of up to 10% for ATI CrossFireX™ configurations

And an update for the ATI Video encoder is also included:

ATI Catalyst 9.5 resolves a number of issues previously seen in the ATI Video Converter and is supported under Windows Vista 32-bit and Windows Vista 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