AMD Catalyst 8.7 drivers online

AMD has put Catalyst 8.7, the latest WHQL drivers for its graphics card online. New to these drivers is the full support for the Radeon HD4800 series and some improvements to the 'information centre' in Catalyst's Control Panel. The Linux version of this new driver fully supports Ubuntu 8.04 and Suse Linux version 10 with SP2.

The drivers are compatible with all Radeon graphics cards newer than the 9500 series. For the all-in-wonder models there's support for all models since the 9600 AIW. The new 8.7 drivers have a number of performance enhancements and several bugs are also fixed. To start of with the performance increase:

• 3DMark Vantage: Performance increases of up to 20% is noticed in the Performance Preset on single card configured systems when using Radeon HD 36xx or Radeon HD 34xx products
• Company of Heroes: 3 to 12% better performance in some levels when using a single HD4800, HD3800 of HD3600 card.
• Lost Planet DX10: Performance increases of 4 to 15% in some levels, again using a single HD4800, HD3800 of HD3600 card.
• Call of Duty 4: 4% better performance in some maps, using a single HD4800 card
  
• Lost Planet DX9: Crossfire now scales to 1.7x and when AA and AF are enabled, performance increases of up to 80% are shown on all compatible Radeon cards.

On top of that, several bugs have been visted in both Vista and XP. A selection of the most important fixes for Vista.

• Assassins Creed: The game nows boots properly on systems using an HD2600 graphics card with 32-bit Vista
• Crysis: Edge detect is now working when playing the DX9 version of the game with UBM enabled
• Frontlines Fuel of War: On the HD3800 series the image corruption is solved when playing on the 1152x864 resolution.
• Hellgate London: game no longer crashes when the resolution is set to 2560x1600.
• Rainbow 6 Vegas: Screen no longer flickers when you switch between the desktop and the game, 8x AA also functions properly now.
• World in Conflict: solved image corruption on high settings
  
• Word of Warcraft: No more empty background when logging in with OpenGL mode.
• ZT: game no longer crashes on 1280x1024 and windowed mode
  
• The Radeon X1800 series no longer give a DTR error in some games when Catalyst AI is set to advanced

The following problems have been solved for XP:

• City of Heroes: Wrong letter display on 2560x1600 resolution
• ET Quake Wars: Game no longer flickers on crossfire systems with HD3800 cards.
• Lost Planet: No more image corruption when switching between the game and the desktop.
• Google SketchUp: The push/pull tool works properly now.
• World of Warcraft: Login problems when AA was enabled solved
• When the driver is installed from CD there will be no displayed warning anymore

For the complete list of bugfixes and existing bugs the PDF can be downloaded here.

Some bugs have also been fixed for Linux. The screen no longer fades after driver installation and the image doesn´t get corrupted when switching between laptop screen and external monitor anymore. SECAM, PAL and NTSC signals are now correctly transfered to the attached television. In Ubuntu 7.04 the command aticonfig --enable-monitor can now be used without rebooting X.

Shamefully, the linux Catalyst drivers still do not support the HD3870 X2 and the AGP versions of the HD2400/HD2600 series and also lacks the TV functionality fo the All-in-Wonder cards. Drivers for your specific configuration can be downloaded by clicking the image below.

Tags: vista linux radeon crossfire

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