Yesterday AMD has released Catalyst 8.5. Next to bugfixes the drivers also bring bew features and performance increases. The new features bring support for 480p and 480i resolutions, TV-out according to the SECAM standard, Adaptive anti-aliasing for OpenGL and support for Windows XP SP3.
More important are the increases in performance, which in some cases, are quite big. An overview of all advantages:
- Up to 12% better performance with Call of Juarez DX10 in combination with a card from the HD3800 series.
- 10 to 30% better performance in Halo for all graphics cards supported by this driver.
- Performance increase of 5 to 35% in Lost Planet for all cards from the HD3000 line-up.
- For Stalker (DX9) 20 tot 50% higher framerate on the HD38xx when HDR is enabled in the game.
- Up to 25% better performance in World in Conflict with the HD3600 and HD3800 graphics cards, the increase can be even bigger when using an HD3870 X2.
Catalyst 8.5 also squashed several bugs. With Vista image corruption has been solved in Clive Barker's Jericho, Tabula Rasa, Team Fortress, Crysis and Farcry's introduction video. In the games Hellgate London and Monster Madness Battle for Suburbia, problems with flickering images have been solved. The new version also fixes bugs in Colin McRae DiRT and DooM 3. Some of the bugs mentioned above can only be experienced in Crossfire configurations, while other, smaller bugs, are mostly noticed when using a second monitor with different settings. All bugs can be found in the complete Windows releasenotes (PDF).
