ATI videocard owners take note - AMD has released new Catalyst drivers, v8.12, for both Windows XP and Vista. The new Catalyst release brings with it performance improvements in several DX9 and DX10 games, including up to a 25 percent boost in Crysis (DX10) for both Single and Crossfire mode. More recent releases, such as Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3, also receive a claimed performance boost by up to 10 percent and 15 percent respectively.

Many bug fixes accompany 8.12, such as improved HD video playback no longer causing Vista to stop responding, better support for connectingan All-in-Wonder card to a Yamaha receiver via an HDMI cable, and several more.

The new drivers also unlock the ATI Stream compute acceleration capabilities built into Radeon HD 3870, HD 3870 X2, and all HD 4000 series graphics cards. Similar to Nvidia's CUDA technology, ATI Stream is a set of advanced hardware and software technologies that enable AMD GPUs to work with the CPU and accelerate applications other than just graphics. To show off the technology, AMD has made available its free ATI Video Converter utility.

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.

A new set of Catalyst graphics drivers is out for users of AMD's Radeon graphics cards in Windows. The driver update is revision 8.1, conforming to AMD's month/year numbering scheme, and it brings a handful of bug fixes and a new feature for multi-monitor users.

The new Catalysts introduce MultiView, a feature AMD says provides "full hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering across multiple graphics adapters setup in an extended desktop display configuration." In short, MultiView "allows for a 3D [application] to have the same performance running on a secondary or third display device as if it were running on the primary display device." Gamers can expect bug fixes in BioShock, Call of Juarez, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, F.E.A.R., Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Oblivion, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., TimeShift, World in Conflict, and World of Warcraft. AMD has also made a Catalyst 8.1 hot fix available to improve multi-GPU performance in Crysis and fix issues with AGP Radeons. The 8.1 Catalysts can be downloaded here for Windows XP and Vista in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, and detailed release notes are available here (PDF).

On the Linux side of things, AMD says it plans to release Catalyst 8.1 drivers for Linux soon. That release will include MultiView, too, and it will introduce support for Ubuntu 7.10 as well as versions 5.1 and 4.6 of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux. In addition, the upcoming drivers will resolve problems related to display corruption after periods of inactivity, support for displays with 1680 x 1050 resolutions, ignored lines in the xorg.conf configuration file, and setting a system to sleep or hibernate. Expect the Linux drivers to be available from AMD's drivers and software page.Source