ATI Catalyst 6.9 bringt Crossfire support to Intel P965 chipset

ATI today has released version 6.9 of their Catalyst drivers. The most interesting new feature is that the new drivers enable Crossfire configurations on Intel P965 chipset based mainboard. The performance however will be a bit lower than with Intel 975X boards, since with the 965 chipset the second graphics card can only be attached to four PCI-Express lanes provided by the ICH8(R) south bridge.  Yesterday MSI already introduced a Crossfire compatible P965 board, the MSI P965 Platinum.

Other improvements include a 6.7-23.7% performance increase in 3DMark06 with anti-aliasing enabled due to improvements in HyperZ efficiency on the Radeon X1300, X1600 and X1800 series of products. The largest gains can be seen on Crossfire configurations and/or 256MB card configurations at resolutions of 1280x1024 or greater. Also Doom 3 performance is improved up to 9.3% due to further OpenGL shader complier and transform engine optimizations on the entire Radeon X1000 Series of products. The largest gains can be seen on Radeon X1900 configurations at resolutions of 1600x1200 or higher.

Catalyst 6.9 can be downloaded on the ATI website and is available for Windows en Linux operating systems. 

Tags: crossfire linux radeon 3dmark

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