ATI Catalyst 8.6 Drivers Released

Wed 2008-06-18 - Posted by Patrick "MACMAC" MacMillan

A few days (or possibly hours…) before the release of the Radeon HD 4800 series, AMD has just released version 8.6 of the ATI Catalyst drivers. This latest update supports all Radeon 9500 and above graphics cards.

So what’s new in this release? For starters, it introduces CrossFireX QUAD support for OpenGL applications, which is a very welcome addition. It allows you to upgrade your Catalyst drivers without rebooting. It also resolves Windows XP and Vista-related issues in a multitude of games. Most importantly though, it provides some impressive performance improvements:

3DMark Vantage:10 to 15% gains across all Radeon™ HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, with larger gains in specific cases.
Call of Duty 4: Performance increases across all Radeon™ HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, with gains as large as 35% in specific maps.
Call of Juarez DX10: Performance increases between 2 and 9% across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products
Company of Heroes (DX10 version): Performance increases between 4 and 10% across HD 36xx and HD 34xx products.
Lost Planet (DX10 version): Performance increases by 1 or 2 fps across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, creating in some cases up to 20% increase.
Lost Planet (DX9 version): Performance increases between 2 and 20% across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products
Prey OpenGL: 3-5% gains across HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products.
Quake 4 OpenGL: Up to 8% increase across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products.
Shadermark 2.1: Minor improvements across all HD 3xxx and HD 2xxx products, with the largest gains appearing on HD 3650 (up to 9%)

If you are hesitant to install these new drivers, wait a few days for TweakTown to post their usual in-depth driver analysis.

Click here to download the official release notes (PDF).

Click here for the download links.

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