To coincide with Windows 7's release to manufacturing, AMD has announced the latest version of its ATI Catalyst graphics driver.

Catalyst 9.7, available to download from game.amd.com, is a single unified WHQL-certified driver for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

Key features (according to AMD):

AMD has delivered its first official unified WHQL certified graphics driver designed for the Windows 7 RTM (Release To Manufacturing)

ATI Catalyst 9.7 delivers a superior Windows 7 experience:

- Great gaming performance ? superior performance compared to Windows Vista for single GPU configurations and ATI CrossFireX configurations
- Stability ? through AMD?s WHQL certified, unified Windows 7 / Windows Vista graphics driver
- Support for all the Windows 7 WDDM 1.1 features and AMD ATI Catalyst features on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of products

ATI Catalyst Control Center Updates

The ATI Catalyst Control Center now features:

- A newly designed Desktops & Displays Manager - enabling users to more quickly configure and arrange their displays
- Full support for HydraVision under Windows 7 The new ATI Catalyst Control Center is supported under Windows 7 and Windows Vista

ATI Video encoder update ? support for Windows 7

- ATI Catalyst 9.7 introduces support for the ATI Video converter under Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit
- Using ATI Stream technology, owners of ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series and ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series of graphics cards can take advantage of this video conversion tool (found in ATI Catalyst Control Center Basic View) to achieve substantial performance improvements when transcoding video files

Performance Improvements:

- Crysis - performance at very high quality preset increases by up to 8% on HD4800 series products
- Lost Planet Colonies - performance increases by 7-11% when 8x Anti-Aliasing is used on the HD4800 series products

For more information, read AMD's release notes