ATI preps Christmas presents

ATI HAS a policy of releasing WHQL revisions of their Catalyst software each month. That was up until now, since the company has decided to issue 13 drivers in a single year.

Catalyst 5.12 will come next week without the support for Radeon X1600 series of products, and that is about to change with X-mas present - driver team is working hard on making 5.13 a reality.

The driver isn't just bug-fixes and X1600 support, but rather has some interesting features to boot. When we talked to the father of Catalyst suite, we learned that the goal of 5.13 is being a "video driver" and bringing a lot of AVIVO marchitecture to life.

While Terry was reluctant to tell us what all was about, we can remember ATI's promise to bring the hardware decoding of next-gen codecs, such as H.264 and WMV-HD before the end of 2005. For free, of course.

We can't stop asking ourselves when will nVIDIA raise the stakes and offer continuous line of fresh drivers, or at least offer H.264 and WMV-HD hardware encoding for free, instead of selling PureVideo (ex-NV DVD) codec. µ