Posted on Thursday, July 23 2009 @ 18:01 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD has rolled out the ATI Catalyst 9.7 drivers, you can get them
over here. The Windows Vista and 7 drivers are already available, while the XP one should follow later today.
Here's the changelog:
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 and ATI CrossFireX™ 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 Updates
The ATI Catalyst™ Control Center now features:
A newly designed Desktops & Displays Manager - enabling users to more quickly
configure and arrange their displays
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
Performance Improvements
Catalyst™ 9.7 brings performance benefits in several cases where framerates are CPU limited.
Some measured examples are:
Crysis - performance at very high quality preset increases by up to 8% on HD4800 series
products
Lost Planet Colonies - performance increases by 7-11% when 8x Anti-Aliasing is used on
the HD4800 series products