He is drinking from the INQwell when he should be drinking beer - Anonymiser
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AMD releases updated Catalyst drivers
CHIP DESIGNER AMD's ATI graphics division released updated versions of its Catalyst drivers today.
Normally the outfit makes a few monthly tweaks but Catalyst 10.2 brings some significant changes, although few people will actually notice.
The Crossfire multi-GPU architecture that used to be part of the core Direct3D and OpenGL drivers has been been moved to a new Crossfire DLL file in the Windows drivers. This means that AMD can make future improvements to the way Crossfire works.
Crossfire game profiles will now be distributed as a small encoded XML file separate from the driver. This means that if a game does not work well with Crossfire multi-GPU setups, ATI can quickly test and distribute a small executable to get it working and improve performance. This can be done without needing to test the whole driver stack. The theory is that you will have more Crossfire support for games that demand fewer resources.
Catalyst 10.2 now has support for Crossfire in Eyefinity setups and has also added a tweak to power utilization. If you don't use that second GPU it enters an ultra-low power state.
Finally, ATI will support audio through DisplayPort. There aren't a lot of DisplayPort monitors that accept audio over the DP connection, but if you have one, it should work now.
There appear to be more changes coming in March. Eyefinity users will get bezel correction that be added to Catalyst 10.3. There will also be per-display colour adjustment added, as well as the ability to make multiple display groups on multi-monitor setups. Switching from one display mode to another will gets hotkey support.
AMD will also be adding a stereoscopic 3D driver hook to Catalyst 10.3. This will allow quad-buffering to enable stereoscopic 3D on 120Hz monitors.
While the great unwashed are unlikely to notice many changes from all this, it means that we might start to see some interesting gear coming out from middleware and monitor vendors who provide 3D graphics that will run with ATI graphics cards. µ
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Definition of drivers is nomore like some engineering code to drive hardware logically ... but definition is like ... Oh nvidia released HF2 with 2 frames more, this new driver of ours is to improve performance in this game, that game and that game, oh ATI increased 1 fps with new driver, our upcoming driver will be to improve performance in "that" game. They have tarnished the definition of "driver". I guess, both nVIDIA and ATI should outsource driver dept to Microsoft. Afterall Firefox people also sat at MS headoffices to learning programing for Firefox.
No love for Fedora 12 Linux users. There's STILL no X.org 1.7 support. So do I choose NVIDIA's defective hardware or ATI's defective software? Feh. At least the ATI open source Linux drivers are coming along.
Charlie Speaks from own nib today & Sounds like curtains for Nvidia team on game card. Here:
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/02/17/nvidias-fermigtx480-broken-and-unfixable/
Speed cut in 1/2 cups 2% yield, that being best they got. 280 watt. Now Considered WORSE than larrabee, only because nVidia won't Stop, Raping itself with Loser.
NVIDIA ADMITS ONLY SOLUTION IS TO START ENGINEERING ALL OVER FROM START ON DX11.
Hey today ati driver alone is 59 Mb. Hope it was 10.2, did't even look as 10.1 was 40 something Mb, wasn't iT. Oh,Well. Maybe Next Month. Waitng for 4D Drivers, with Black hole In 'Em.
STeWie.
hmm, cant seems to see the updated ati page at the mo, hope its up soon.
Hope they fixed the dreaded grey screen problem on this release.
nVidia was able to bully game developers because of their marketshare and money. As both seems to be shrinking, I presume less developers are going to let they mess with their codes.
It's good that AMD is introducing more feature and is regrouping the way the driver development works BUT they should really take nVIDIA's example and send 2 ~ 3 software engineers to some companies developing some important game titles and work out better optimization of that particular game. Or .. if not much optimizing is done, they should, at least, make sure that NVIDIA's engineers do not mess up the game code like they did with Borderlands or Batman. These are 2 games where the developer allowed nVIDIA to work on the game code and nVIDIA, bedides the supposed "optimizations" they've made sure the game will not work properly on ATi cards. Also .. there are some areas where driver performance should be stellar. One example is Adobe Flash. There is no reason ATi shouldn't performing just as good or better than nVIDIA when Flash computing is the issue at hand.