Following the release of Nvidia's Forceware drivers for Vista, AMD released today a new set of Catalyst graphics drivers, bringing them to version 7.4. AMD Catalyst 7.4

AMD's Catalyst v7.4 drivers are available for Windows XP x86, Windows XP x64, Windows Vista x86, and Windows Vista x64. The release notes mention that the new drivers introduce the Avivo Video Converter for the Vista (32-bit) operating system. The Avivo Video Converter is a tool that provides a quick way of converting videos from one format to another. The Avivo Video Converter found within the Catalyst Control Center accepts a wide variety of file formats as a source, and outputs to file formats such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX, WMA, H.264/AVC and more. In addition, Catalyst v7.4 offers higher OpenGL performance under the Microsoft Vista for all Radeon X1000 series of products, in both single card and hardware CrossFire configurations. Typical Improvements of 15% or more can be seen in games such as Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey, with enthusiast class of products seeing improvements of 30% or more.

Nvidia ForceWare 158.18 For Vista

Nvidia also released yesterday a new version of its ForceWare graphics drivers. This 158.18 BETA release is available for both Windows Vista x86 and Windows Vista x64.

The drivers add support for Nvidia's GeForce 8 latest cards, restore vertical sync control for DirectX apps, and introduce a brand new control panel that does away with the task-based approach and more or less restores the previous control panel design. H

A complete list of fixes is available in Nvidia's release notes for the drivers.