ATI today also released updated Catalyst drivers. The new ATI Catalyst 7.9 brings mainly game performance improvements.

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AMD today announced plans to extend its leadership position in graphics software with major enhancements to performance and compatibility for ATI Radeon graphics for consumer Linux users. These improvements are planned for subsequent releases of ATI's Catalyst software package beginning in early September. This announcement represents a significant first step in redefining the graphics landscape for Linux consumer users. Moving forward, AMD also plans to accelerate efforts to address the needs of the open source community as well.

AMD/ATI has leaked the latest unofficial Catalyst 7.9 driver. Coming in both Windows XP and Vista flavors, this beta version only adds support for the AGP versions of the Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 series. The driver is dated August 1st. Use at your own risk!

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ATI Catalyst 7.8 drivers released

AMD/ATI has released Catalyst 7.8 for the month of August 2007. There is 24 issues that have been fixed for Windows Vista, and another eleven issues fixed for Windows XP. The Vista Driver Security Flaw should haven been fixed with this release. However there is no mention of that being fixed in the release notes.

New Features:

• Overdrive for the HD2400/2600 Series in crossfire, and single card setups.

Performance Improvements:

• Lost Planet DX10 with anti-aliasing improves 11% or greater on HD2900XT products.
• HD2400/2600 (single and CrossFire) show improvements of as much as 6% in 3DMark 2006 and 3DMark 2005.
• Serious Sam 2 with HDR enabled improves as much as 14.5% on Radeon HD2900, Radeon HD2600 and Radeon HD2400 products.

Link to the download and release notes.

The market recently discovered a potential security vulnerability that could impact AMD's Catalyst software package. After immediate investigation, AMD determined that a small section of code from one of the files in our installer package is potentially vulnerable.
The AMD plan is to provide a new ATI Catalyst package no later than Monday, Aug. 13, 2007, that resolves this vulnerability. We strongly recommend that desktop ATI Radeon graphics users update to Catalyst version 7.8 once it is available here.

AMD and Microsoft are also investigating additional distribution channels for this update. This vulnerability was not exclusive to AMD.

An unpatched flaw in drivers from ATI creates a means to smuggle malware past improved security defences in the latest version of Windows and into the Vista kernel.

Microsoft is working with ATI on an update which security watchers warn might be far from straightforward to roll-out.

AMD/ATI has released new Catalyst 7.8 BETA video drivers. Unfortunately there're no release notes for this release. Use at your own risk.

ATI Catalyst 7.8 BETA all OS

Anyone who owns an AMD graphics card and runs it under Windows knows that driver updates are complete and frequent. However, change the operating system, and this level of support seems to evaporate. You're lucky to even get a LiveCD to boot if you have an ATI card in your system, and even if you manage to install a version of *nix, good luck getting 3D applications to run bug-free.

Thankfully, AMD decided to listen to their customers. The latest AMD Catalyst for Linux is much cleaner, much more efficient, and much faster than the older version of Catalyst. Classic *nix functions, such as switching between X server and CLI are much smoother/don't freeze the system, and late 3D applications (even simple ones such as Google Earth) actually work now, which couldn't be said for older versions of AMD Catalyst for Linux.

Granted, the Linux version is not as fully featured as the Windows version. However, it is just as functional, and just as stable, as the Windows version, which is a huge step in the right direction for *nix users.

ATI has updated the Catalyst display driver for all 9500 series and newer cards, taking the version number to 7.6. Numerous issues have been resolved, and there are also significant performance improvements for Half Life 2: Episode 1 and Dark Messiah Might and Magic when using a dual 2900 XT setup. Full release notes are available on the ATI website, with the download links as follows:

• XP 32-bit - download
• XP 64-bit - download
• Vista 32-bit - download
• Vista 64-bit download

ATI has released a new version 7.5 of their Catalyst software suit. This release of Catalyst introduces the following new features:

• DirectX 10 driver support for the Radeon HD 2900 XT (single card and CrossFire configurations) for Windows Vista
• Second Generation ATI Theater 650

Not a word about Radeon HD 2900 XT performance improvements in this release. Download the latest ATI Catalyst drivers from here.

The following driver version 8.37.4.3 is provided as an update to the driver software that currently ships with the Radeon HD 2900 series products. The download file contains the display drivers and Catalyst Control Center. This driver applies to the following operating systems: Windows XP Home/Professional/Media Center Edition/Professional x64 Edition and Windows Vista 32/64-bit. For more information please refer to the release notes.

AMD/ATI has released new official drivers for ATI based video cards. This release of Catalyst has improved OpenGL performance under the Microsoft Vista operating system 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. This release of Catalyst also adds the Avivo Video Converter for Windows Vista (32-bit). Head over the AMD/ATI download section and select the proper Catalyst driver for your operating system and video card.

The French Station Drivers let you download a leaked Beta of the upcoming Catalyst 7.3. Of course the driver is non-official and the improvements appear to be very minor. OCWorkbench ran it through their paces and differences to the Catalyst 7.2 aren't nearly there.

A recent interview with ATI/AMD at ExtremeTech shows some insight to future versions of Catalyst Control Center (CCC) software. AMD/ATI knows that previous versions have been lagging, complicated, and somewhat bloated. AMD made a good effort to fix this by a complete rewrite of CCC, but it still feels a bit lacking to some people. Instead of working on making the current CCC faster and more streamlined (like the old control panel), AMD/ATI is focusing on making one centralized application to manage all AMD/ATI products.

Says AMD representative Phil Rogers: "Longer term our goal is continue to improve the user experience and to move towards a single or central user interface where AMD customers can configure the majority of AMD product settings... It is our goal and vision to eventually have a single UI for all AMD products (graphics, CPU, chipset), but this is of course a major project, and it will be quite some time before we're able to release such a product"

This means that AMD hopes to make their control center much more featured, but this may prove to backfire upon release. With great power comes great responsibility, as Spiderman's Uncle Ben once said. And if AMD can't quite handle the responsibility, we may be looking at one complex, bloated driver interface.

ATI/AMD has released its latest Windows XP Catalyst driver, version 7.1, for the newer Radeon cards (9600 and newer). There have been quite a few minor fixes, official download available here.

ATI Catalyst 7.1 Beta for Windows Vista Available

This is a beta version of the upcoming Catalyst 7.1 Radeon driver from ATI/AMD. We are sure a lot of people will be really pleased to see it. The revision build of this archive is 8.33 and should be an interesting driver for sure. I can not stress enough that this is a beta driver which is distributed by ASUS. You use it at your own risk.

Download: ATI Catalyst 7.1 Beta for Window Vista (91.6MB)

While NVIDIA still hasn't posted a G80 driver, ATI has upgraded it's suite of drivers for Windows Vista. Anyone with Windows Vista RC2 or RTM can download and install the latest version of Catalyst Beta Driver for Windows Vista, which fixes issues in several games such as Serious Sam 2. It also fixes issues in Windows Media Player, the general installation/uninstallation of the drivers, and Temporal Anti-Aliasing. You can read the full release notes here.

You can download the December 13th version of the drivers here.

AMD/ATI does not reccomend using these drivers on mission-critical systems, does not support them, and says they will only install on a computer with Windows Vista RC2 or later.

ATI has released new official Catalyst 6.12 drivers for ATI based video cards. This release of the ATI Catalyst software suite introduces DirectX video acceleration for CrossFire enabled configurations.

Download: ATI Catalyst 6.12 Software Suite (34.6MB)