AMD released a new version of its Catalyst software/driver suite.

Catalyst v8.1 mainly resolves issues for the Windows Vista operating system and also add new features: MultiView

Catalyst 8.1 introduces MultiView support. This feature provides for hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering across multiple graphics adapters. MultiView will provide hardware accelerated 3D rendering in a system containing multiple graphics cards on an extended desktop arrangement. This feature will allow for the rendering performance and additional frame buffer resources to be evenly shared with the second and third graphics adapters. This allows for a 3D applica- tion to have the same performance running on a secondary or third display device as if it were running on the primary display device. This feature will be supported under Windows XP (32 and 64 bit versions), Windows Vista (32 and 64 bit ver- sions), and the Linux operating system.

ATI?s Folding@Home

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project designed by the Stanford Uni- versity. The application performs intensive simulations of protein folding. This simulation will help researchers uncover how certain diseases develop. Fold- ing@Home uses distributed computing to simulate protein folding, the workload is broken up into small work units and distributed across hundreds of thousands of computers over the internet.

For more information on Catalyst 8.1 (for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux versions), including all of the resolved issues in this release, see the Catalyst 8.1 release notes.

Downloads are available at AMD's driver download section.