ATI releases Catalyst 6.9 for Win and Linux

ATI HAS JUST released the new Catalyst driver. To our surprise, the new drivers bring in Crossfire support for Intel's latest 965 chipset. ATI claims the Crossfire works in Direct 3D applications but it doesn't work on OpenGL. Support for Open GL and 965 chipset will come later this year. The driver supports Radeon X1900 Crossfire edition cards. However, the new X1950 or slower are not included on the supported this list.

As for performance improvement, the new driver speeds up the 3Dmark06 and you can expect that the overall performance will improve from 6.7 to 23.7 percent with anti-aliasing. ATI claims that it improved the Hyper Z efficiency for Radeon X1300, X1600 and X1800 generation of cards. The largest gain is on Crossfire configurations with 256MB cards and resolutions of 1280x1024 or higher.

On Radeon, the whole range of Radeon X1000 cards Doom 3 scores improves for up to 9.3 percent. It is due the further OpenGL Shader compiler and transform and engine optimisation. The largest gain is on Radeon X1900 cards and 16x12 or higher resolutions.

The new Linux 6.9 driver also known as 8.29.6 includes support for Linux Kernel 2.6.18. You can find the windows driver here while you can get the Linux one here or 64 bit Linux one here. If you really want to see what exactly ATI driver team fixed in this release check it here. µ