AMD has released its fifth graphics card driver of the year, Catalyst 8.5, for both Windows and Linux. While the latter is very much alike the previously released drivers of this year, they do bring better 2D performance and lay the ground works for AMD’s bigger updates coming this summer. AMD’s Linux support has vastly improved over the last year or so and we expect to see more this summer. Catalyst 8.5 for Windows brings some more impressive updates and improvements.
The TV support has gone through some major rework and AMD touts a number of new features which should appeal to the HTPC crowd, along with some other performance-related updates;
- Catalyst™ Control Center Component Video
- ATI Graphics Driver Un-install Enhancement
- SECAM TV Out Support
- 1080p HDTV custom mode
- HDMI Audio for non-standard TV modes
- Adaptive AA on OpenGL for Catalyst™ Control Center
- 1080p24 Mode Support
- Windows XP Service Pack 3 support
The most noticeable performance improvements are as follows;
- Call of Juarez DX10: Performance increases up to 12% on systems containing an ATI Radeon™ HD 3xx0 series of product
- Halo: Performance increases by 10-30% across all of the supported ATI Radeon™ series of products
- Lost Planet DX10: Performance increases from 5 to 35% on systems containing an ATI Radeon™ HD 3xx0 series of product
- Stalker DX9: Performance increases by 20-50% when HDR is enabled in the game; across all ATI Radeon™ HD38x0 series of products
- World in Conflict DX10: Performance increases up to 25% on systems containing an ATI Radeon™ HD36x0 and/or an ATI Radeon™ 38×0 series of product. Higher performance gains are noticed on systems contianing [sic] an ATI Radeon™ 3870×2 series of product
Along with a long list of bugfixes, which you can find in the release notes.
Also, if you look inside the inf-file you will find at least four new graphics cards listed; Radeon HD 3730 (RV630), Radeon HD 3750 (RV630), Radeon HD 3410 (RV610), Radeon HD 3550 (RV610). No trace of the Radeon HD 3830 (RV670) though, but Radeon HD 3690 (RV670) is still there which might be why Radeon HD 3830 isn’t. We’ll just have to wait and see if the other cards pops up anytime soon. Chances are they will be OEM-only.
Phoronix has some more information on the status of the Linux driver and what we might see in the near future.
You can fetch the driver from AMD’s website.
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