AMD has released the latest version of its Catalyst drivers, as well as a hotfix for specific AGP cards. New Features Catalyst v9.12

ATI Catalyst support for DirectCompute 10.1

This release of ATI Catalyst provides full support for DirectCompute 10.1 for the ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series, ATI Radeon HD 4700 Series for both single card and ATI CrossFireX supported configurations.

OpenGL 3.2 extension support

This release of ATI Catalyst provides support for OpenGL 3.2 extension support on the ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series, ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series, ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series. The following is a list of OpenGL 3.2 features and extensions added in ATI Catalyst 9.12:

- Support for OpenGL Shading Language 1.50
- BGRA vertex component ordering (GL_ARB_vertex_array_bgra)
- Drawing commands allowing modification of the base vertex index (GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex)
- Shader fragment coordinate convention control (GL_ARB_fragment_coord_conventions) - Provoking vertex control (GL_ARB_provoking_vertex)
- Seamless cube map filtering (GL_ARB_seamless_cube_map)
- Multisampled textures and texture samplers for specific sample locations (GL_ARB_texture_multisample)
- Fragment depth clamping (GL_ARB_depth_clamp)
- Geometry shaders (GL_ARB_geometry_shader4)
- Fence sync objects (GL_ARB_sync)
- transform_feedback2
- texture_cubemap_array

Performance Improvements

The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalyst 9.12:

- 3DMark Vantage - overall performance improves as much as 9% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 and ATI Radeon HD 5700 series products. GT1 ? Jane Nash performance improves as much as 15% and FT4 - GPU Cloth improves up to 15%
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat - Performance improves as much as 6% on single card configurations

For additional information read Catalyst 9.12 Release Notes.

The 9.12 Catalysts are available for Windows 7, Vista, and XP in 32-bit and 64-bit variants on AMD's Game website.

AGP Hotfix

The hotfix released 12/17/2009 solves the "No compatible hardware found" error when installing Catalyst drivers for ATI Radeon HD 4000, ATI Radeon HD 3000 and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series AGP products

The error message comes up when attempting to install the ATI Catalyst Drivers directly from the AMD Download Home Page for the ATI Radeon HD 4000, ATI Radeon HD 3000 or ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of AGP video cards.

Informaton about the hotfix and downloads are available here