About every year or so, the software team at ATI, which is now a part of AMD, produces a Catalyst driver suite that introduces a handful of major new features, above and beyond their regular monthly release. And at least so far, for 2008, this new Catalyst v8.3 suite appears to be that major release. We’re sure ATI will have more in store as the year progresses, but for now there is plenty of new ground to cover.

We were recently given a chance to chat with some folks from ATI about all of the new features they have in store for users with the Catalyst v8.3 release and we'll be outlining some of the finer details here today. In addition to the typical batch of performance enhancements and bug fixes available with each new Catalyst release, the v8.3 suite is going to deliver official support for three and four GPU CrossFireX and Hybrid CrossFire, plus some new anti-aliasing features, previously unavailable tweaks for video playback, and GPU LCD scaling, among some other things. As we’ve mentioned, the Catalyst v8.3 driver suite will officially support three and four GPU CrossFireX configurations. You may have heard some scuttlebutt over the last few weeks stating that CrossFire works with some mismatched GPUs as well, which is actually the case. AMD's new Catalyst v8.3 drivers will let users match up Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards, with standard 3870s and even the 3850 - basically any RV670 / R680 combo will work. This is interesting because it adds some level of flexibility to end-users looking to take advantage of a multi-GPU setup. Three-way CrossFireX configuration can consist of three Radeon HD 3870 cards, or a single 3870 X2 and single 3870, for example, or any other combo of HD 3800 series cards. And four-way CrossFireX can be achieved with a pair of Radeon 3870 X2 cards, or four standard 3870s, etc. We should note, however, that three and four-GPU CrossFireX is only supported under Windows Vista and only with DirectX 9 and some DirectX 10 titles at this time. Full Support for DirectX 10 (with four GPU scaling) and OpenGL will come at a later time, although Call of Juarez happens to be one DX10 game that does scale currently with four GPUs. Also note, two card CrossFire is obviously still supported in XP; it's just the three and four GPU setups that are exclusive to Vista.