ATI releases Catalyst beta drivers

ATI HAS AT LAST released its Catalyst beta 1 AMD64 drivers, which many people have been waiting for. The drivers are for use with the Radeon line of video cards.

AMD news, reviews and general info website AMD Zone has decided to put them under the test, to check out exactly how well they perform. Using a laptop with Windows XP, an Athlon 64 3000+, 512MB of DDR333 memory and the Radeon Mobility 9600, AMDZone carried out a number of tests.

The driver release notes lists a bunch of performance problems linked with Direct 3D and OpenGL when running applications like Serious Sam 2 and Quake 3. Maybe that can be fixed, though.

AMDZone don't seem to be too keen on the driver's performance with their first test, using 3Dmark 2003 - in their own words, they "confirm that the Radeon 9600 Mobility with these beta drivers does indeed perform poorly". When tested with Final Fantasy XI, they got similar results - not looking too good. The Unreal Tournament 2004 demo also tested badly, however, Halo ran quite nicely according to the site. µ

L'INQ
Check out the AMDZone report for yourself here.