ATI releases Catalyst 8.12 drivers

ATI released yesterday new drivers for their Radeon range of graphics card, promising graphical performance improvements of up to 25%, as well as resolving several graphical and stability issues.

The new Catalyst 8.12 software also includes support for ATI Stream Computing, which makes available the GPU processing power for non-graphical applications.

Catalyst 8.12 is available for download at the game.amd.com website.

Listed below are all game-related changes in the release notes:

Performance Improvements

• Call of Duty: World at War DX9 – performance gains of up to 21% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD48xx.
• Crysis DX10 – performance gains of up to 25% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx.
• Crysis Warhead DX10 – performance gains of up to 13% for Single card mode and up to 16% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx.
• Devil May Cry 4 DX10 – performance gains of up to 6% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.
• Fallout 3 – performance gains of up to 15% for Single card mode.
• Far Cry 2 DX10 – performance gains of up to 10% for Single card mode and up to 57% in Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.
• FEAR DX9 – performance gains of up to 6% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on Radeon HD4870X2 and HD4870.
• Hellgate: London DX10 – performance gains of up to 6% for Single card mode and up to 10% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx.
• Left 4 Dead DX9 – performance gains of up to 10% for Single card mode and up to 5% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4870 series.
• Lost Planet Colonies DX10 – performance gains of up to 10% for Single and Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.
• Prey OGL – performance gains of up to 15% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on Radeon HD4870 1GB products, HD46xx, HD45xx.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky – performance gains of up to 10% for Crossfire mode. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.
• Unreal Tournament 3 DX9 – performance gains of up to 18% for Single card mode and up to 15% in Crossfire mode, especially in cases where AA is enabled. Performance gains were noticed on all Radeon HD4xxx and HD38xx.

Resolved Issues for the Windows Vista Operating System

• Setting shadow quality to high or medium may cause flickering in World of Warcraft
• Age of Conan DirectX 10, may intermittently become unresponsive during game play

Resolved Issues for the Windows XP Operating System

• City of Villains: Attempting to launch the game on a system running Windows XP and containing either two ATI Radeon HD 38×0 or 46×0 products may result in the game failing to load and the operating system failing to respond