ATI releases Catalyst 6.5 drivers

LONG, LONG AGO, ATI promised it would add support for Vista into its latest Radeon X1000 generation of products. It said that it would do so as soon as Microsoft released the Beta 2. So now in the middle of Microsoft's Winhac 2006 hardware conference, ATI released its Windows Vista beta 2 driver. The graphics chipmaker kept its word.

It is interesting that this driver finally supports X1800 and X1900 cards or older, so you will be able to use Vista beta 2 with your new ATI cards. There are two drivers, one for the 32-bit and one for the 64-bit version of Vista. The drive weighs in at 87.1MB. I can remember the times when graphic driver was just 1.5MB but six years can do a lot for graphics, broadband Internet too.

The new Catalyst 6.5 for Windows XP has a new feature, Overlay Theater Mode, and it finally allows you to play video on two displays, original and cloned.

We noticed that sometimes you cannot get overlay on the second display but now it's already solved. We are playing with video here in Vienna, big time. [Not sure we need to know that, Fudo. Ed]

The chaps that are using X1600 and X1300 Crossfire systems can expects Up to 23% gain in UT2004 and up to 20% gain in Splinter Cell, ATI says. You can download the new XP driver here.

The link for Vista Beta 2 driver is here. µ