ATI has just released Catalyst 6.6 for both Windows and Linux platforms.

New Features:

Avivo Video Converter Extension for Windows Media Center Edition Catalyst 6.6 introduces a Windows Media Center Edition Video Conversion utility. This utility will allow users to convert video content that is either recorded or available to Media Center Edition to a variety of different formats. The video content can be converted to MPEG-2, MPEG-4 SP, MPEG-4/AVC and Windows Media. iPod video and Sony PSP?s are also supported with an optimized profile for these devices.

Theater 650 Pro TV Tuner Support
Catalyst 6.6 includes support for NTSC/ATSC and PAL/SECAM/DVB-T products based on the Theater 650 Pro TV Tuner chip. The Theater 650 Pro is a new chip from ATI for multimedia cards and DTV-on-a-chip solutions, integrating hardware video encoding, digital audio and with noise reduction, and hardware PVR functions in a single chip.

Performance Improvements
As with most Catalyst releases, performance has increased in various situations:

- Far Cry performance improves 4-5%. Larger gains of up to 18.3% can been seen when using anisotropic filtering
- Fear performance as much as 8.5% on X1800 and X1900 Single card systems and as much as 14% on X1800 and X1900 Crossfire systems
- Splinter Cell (original) performance improves as much a 7% on X1300 and X1600 Crossfire systems.

Download ATI Catalyst v6.6 for WinXP here.

Highlights of the Linux Catalyst 6.6 (8.26.18) release include:

Hotplug Support for Digital Flat Panels

- This release of the ATI Proprietary Linux driver introduces support for dynamically attaching a Digital Flat Panel (DFP). The attached display will show a cloned image of the primary display. For this feature to work please ensure that the daemon /sbin/atieventsd is started.2636.

Thermal Event Power Management

- This release of the ATI Proprietary Linux driver now enables Thermal Event Power Management. The ATI Proprietary Linux driver now reacts to Thermal Events by throttling down the GPU to prevent overheating. For this feature to work please ensure that the daemon /sbin/atieventsd is started.