Catalyst 8.5 Released

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Thursday, May 22, 2008

Catalyst 8.5 Released

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The Catalyst 8.5 has been released and it comes with support for almost every graphics card from the Radeon 9500 up.

This new driver features the following:

- Catalyst Control Center Component Video - This release of Catalyst introduces 480i and 480p support. These formats will be found in the pre-defined component video format list found in the Catalyst Control Center->Component Video->Advanced page.

- ATI Graphics Driver Un-install Enhancement - This release of Catalyst introduces an update to the ATI un-install utility. The utility now pop up dialogue box to show two options to the end user, Remove ATI Radeon graphics software, leave chipset software. Completely remove all ATI/AMD (Graphics/Chipset) software.

- SECAM TV Out Support - This release of Catalyst introduces support within the graphics driver to enable TV output adhering to the SECAM standard.

- 1080p HDTV custom mode - This release of Catalyst 1080p HDTV display mode. This feature will be available for display devices that use an HDMI connector and is available under the Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

- HDMI Audio for non-standard TV modes - This release of Catalyst introduces HDMI audio support for all TV timing modes and non-standard (CEA 861b) TV modes. If a non-standard mode is used, on initial connection to the TV, a pop-up notification should let the user know that the audio may be out of sync. A UI allows for the audio to be disabled by the user if desired. The UI in Catalyst Control Center would show the list of TV timing modes (both standard and non-standard) and the capability to enable audio for a given mode.

- Adaptive AA on OpenGL for Catalyst Control Center - This release of Catalyst introduces Adaptive AA for Orca Driver, geometry for alpha tested objects are now submitted multiple times to the hardware using the multi-sample mask feature to update one sample at a time in the frame buffer using centroid sampling. With each pass of the sampling position for textures is shifted to be at the location of the sample that is being updated in that pass.

- 1080p24 Mode Support - This release of Catalyst introduces 1080p24 mode support This feature will be available for display devices that use an HDMI connector and is available under the Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

- Windows XP Service Pack 3 support - This release of Catalyst introduces WHQL certified support for Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 3 update for all ATI Radeon Series products.

- Performance Improvements

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 38x0 series of product. Higher performance gains are noticed on systems contianing an ATI Radeon 3870x2 series of product

The complete changelog is available here.

You can download the package here.