ATI AMD finally releases Catalyst 6.10

ATI HAS chosen to wait for the dying hours of Halloween to release an upgrade to its Catalyst driver.

AMD released the new drivers for both Linux and Windows but it still doesn't have the RC2 driver for Microsoft Vista. The new driver improves the Crossfire scores on Intel 965 due to improvements in Crossfire D3D as it can handle large vertex meshes more efficiently. AMD also helped Crossfire run better on Intel and it scores 6.7 to 15.8 per cent faster.

There's a 9.7 to 10.5 per cent improvement in 3Dmark05 and 3Dmark03 improves as much as 7.1 per cent.

The new driver brings some extra features - foremost among them the official HDR + Anti-Aliasing support for The Elder Scrolls Oblivion, this was beta for a long time. You no longer need the famous "Chuck" patch to make it work, now it works from scratch.

This driver officially supports Stanford Universitiy's Folding@Home GPU client. This makes distributed computing faster but you need a X1900 or X1950 card to make it work. ATI claims that its GPU can find a protein twenty to forty times faster than the CPU version of client. That is an impressive numbe if you're in the protein hunting business. You can get the client at Stanford's website here.

The Linux Catalyst 6.10 (8.30.3) fixes a few problems. Users with X Server X.org 7.1 can now play video using XV. The Avivo video adaptor is now presented in the driver. The driver won't report failing to change the TV format in aticonfig, it will do it now and you can drag any window on top of Mplayer and you won't get pausing or corruption. Windows Catalyst 34.2 MB file is here while the Linux one is here. µ

They say its better late than never, but the chaps did it. Expect 6.11 in less than 30 days from now. µ