AMD launches Catalyst 9.6 driver

Yesterday AMD launched a new version of its ATI Catalyst driver for grpahics cards, which brings us to version 9.6. Catalyst 9.6 is compatible with all Radeon graphics cards from the HD 2400 series and up, as well as a number of integrated chips, three professional FireStream cards and some products from the Multimedia line-up. The updated driver can be downloaded from AMD's website and supports Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Linux.

As we've come to expect of these updates, the new Catalyst driver brings several performance improvements and bugfixes. A complete overview of the alterations and solutions, as well as still present bugs can be found in the Catalyst 9.6 release notes. We've listed some of the updates below:

ATI's Catalyst 9.6 brings improvements in the following games:

• Company of Heroes: up to 25% increased performance with Radeon HD 4600 cards and up to 10% with HD 4800 models.
• Crysis Warhead: up to 11% greater performance in CrossFireX configurations.
• Crysis: up to 13% more performance in CrossFireX configurations.
• World in Conflict: up to 30% increased performance in cases where the CPU was a limiting factor.

Specific problems have been solved for the individual versions of Windows, as can be read in the release notes. For all Windows versions, the following issues have been fixed regarding the Catalyst Software Suite:

• Catalyst Control Center no longer crashes after opening the CrossFire section.
• Some systems with multiple monitors will now be able to shut down the primary monitor in the clone mode.
•  Adjusting the bitrate sliders while converting a WMV-file will no longer crash the Catalyst Control Center.
• Displaying the OverDrive settings has been fixed for a large number of computers.
• Catalyst Control Center is no longer displayed interlaced when automatic deinterlacing is enabled.
• The display configurations no longer disappear after attaching a CRT monitor in clone mode.
• The scaling slider with an SDTV has been fixed.

Users of the Linux distributions SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, including version 11, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 will also be able to install AMD's Catalyst drivers on their operating systems from now on. Users of Linux in combination with a Radeon HD 2000, 3000 or 4000 graphics card will also feature MultiView. This option allows applications to render across multiple GPU's via a unified workspace. Xinerama, an extension of the X Windows System that transforms two or more physical monitors to a large virtual workspace, is also available for Linux now, supporting both single- and multi-GPU configurations.

Tags: crossfire hd46x0 linux radeon vista

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